Asian Junior Tennis Championships shows Indian tennis is in bad shape

Winner Bhargava: Awed by the occasionLast month two Allahabad boys met on a tennis court in Hyderabad to decide which of them would be the new Asian junior champion. The encounter ended in just over an hour, and the lithe Deepak Bhargava tossed his racquet gleefully into the air a la Borg, in the manner of a winner who has overcome a stiff challenge. Perhaps the gesture was also meant to tell the 500-odd Sunday afternoon crowd at the Lal Bahadur Stadium that his 6-3, 6-3 win over Mayank Capoor represented the high point of tennis in the country.The victory was, however, deceptive. The Asian Junior Tennis Championships, held over one week from April 6 to April 13, were more of a farce than anything else. Only 14 boys and nine girls participated in the contest. Twenty-two nations had been invited, but only six accepted: Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Malaysia. The forlorn organizers - the All India Lawn Tennis Association (AILTA) and the Andhra Pradesh Lawn Tennis Association - then worked out a last-minute move to salvage the championships. Fifteen Indian boys and five girls swelled the ranks of the participants, and gave the tournament a healthier look. However, these late entrants played mostly among themselves and were eliminated in the qualifying rounds.The careless organisation did not end there. Though the players were fewer than expected, those who participated had to play matches at odd hours. The Indian girls Nandini Rangarajan and Namratha Appa Rao, the national junior No. 1 and No. 2 respectively, were knocked out of the reckoning in a doubles encounter with the fancied Koreans. The match began after 10 in the morning and went on in sweltering heat for more than two hours. Afterwards an exhausted Rangarajan remarked: "It seemed like we had been out in the sun for more than four hours." For the Koreans, the mid-day sun must have been worse.Illogical Ranking: Apart from the thoughtless schedules, the seedings were erratic, perhaps because of the poor participation. Capoor was described as a 'giant killer' for having got past seeded players to reach the finals, while he was obviously better than his opponents. Both the girls singles finalists were unseeded, and champion Bhargava had been seeded fourth. This kind of illogical ranking reinforced the impression that the organisers were merely going through the motions in holding the championships.Bad organisation apart, the tournament clearly showed that Indian tennis is in bad shape. Capoor, who has been coached by the famous Akhtar Ali, did shine in the earlier matches, but the finals showed up his weaknesses: unsteady service and weak returns ruined his game and the last of the weak returns gave Bhargava the title. However, Bhargava was a rather passive victor as he did not force Capoor into errors. Runner-up Capoor: Weak returnsOn the contrary, the winner seemed overawed by the occasion: he was one match away from the title for which he had been in the 'also ran' category last year. Despite a training stint at Harry Hopman's legendary school in the United States, Bhargava did not display that winning instinct which is a hallmark of Hopman alumni. In fact, when Capoor and Bhargava had met earlier this year in the national championships at Pune's Deccan Gymkhana, Capoor had beaten Bhargava for the junior title.Successful Strategy: The girls final between Kumiko Okamoto of Japan and Kim Inn-Sook of South Korea was an equally mediocre affair. Okamoto double-faulted in her service at least a dozen times before winning 6-2, 6-1. But she played some power-packed forehead drives that surpassed anything that even the boys could show. She was a pointer to the success of the Japanese strategy of assigning each of its top-ranking players to an exclusive coach. The Indians had no coach assigned to them during the tournament; ironically, about a score of them attended a seminar on coaching conducted by Steve Devereux, chief coach, International Tennis Federation.India would do well to follow the Japanese way of catching them young. The 16-year-old Okamoto took to tennis when only eight. Says she: "Today, tennis is the fastest growing sport in my country. There are 2, 000 teams entered for the nation-wide contest for schoolgoers. And all over Japan there are two million people playing tennis on 60.000 courts." Enthusiasm for the sport has led the Japanese to convert rice paddies into courts.The picture in India is in direct contrast to this. The AILTA has no plan for systematically developing the sport. An official argues that progress is tied to available resources and players who can afford the money for the expensive racquets and balls. While this is partly true, the AILTA for its part has done little to spot talent, provide it with adequate facilities, and develop it through participation in tournaments at home and abroad. The association even failed to attract the big names of tennis for the satellite tournaments. The powers-that-be of the Indian tennis circuit will have to shake off their stupor if the country is to produce more than just an Amritraj here and a Krishnan there. Published By: AtMigration Published On: Feb 27, 2014 12:04 IST--- ENDS ---

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Asian Junior Tennis Championships shows Indian tennis is in bad shape

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