Cash not the key to producing champs

It was only four years ago that Steffi Graf capped off her career with her 22nd Grand Slam singles win at the French Open.

Graf, Boris Becker and Michael Stich may have captured 29 Grand Slam crowns between them in the 1980s and 1990s, but the state of German tennis has been spiralling downwards since then. Rainer Schuettler’s run to the Australian Open final in January offered the country’s fans a glimmer of hope, but that proved to be a false dawn and the world number eight has achieved little since. Stich, whose brief reign as Davis Cup captain came to an end last year, said: “We’ve got to where we belong at the moment.

“It will be no cakewalk to get out from down there now.”

For nine-times Davis Cup winners Britain, the situation is even worse. While the Lawn Tennis Association invested 25.6 million pounds ($42.31 million) into British tennis in 2002, the results tell their own story.

Even two of the best men’s players the country has produced, Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski, could not prevent them falling to defeat at the hands of Morocco.

Virginia Wade was the last British player to win one of the four major tournaments at Wimbledon in 1977.

In Davis Cup, even a country like India, which has yet to produce a singles Grand Slam champion, is now ranked higher at 15th than Germany and Britain.

As both nations struggle to find an answer to their lack of young talent, they could do worse than to check out the tennis production manuals of Argentina and Croatia.

Neither country has the financial wherewithal to make huge investments in facilities, but both have managed to produce gifted players who are landing major trophies. Goran Ivanisevic’s Wimbledon win two years ago sparked a boom in Croatia and Argentina now has six players in the men’s top 50, including world number five and Hamburg Masters champion Guillermo Coria.

“My victory in Hamburg is very important for tennis in Argentina,” Coria said in May. “The economic situation is bad in Argentina, so junior players don’t get a chance to travel and fulfil their talent.

“They don’t have the opportunity. So maybe if we keep winning, we keep the door open for them to continue their career.”

His compatriot Agustin Calleri added: “It’s our own sacrifice that have helped us to make it to the top, because we never really got much help from the Argentinean tennis federation. (Reuters)