"You can get away with making bad decisions because it doesn’t really hurt you": Poisoned chalice of money hurts British tennis as Mark Petchey delivers scathing verdict

Linda Noskova became champion at Wimbledon defeating fellow Czech ace Karolina Muchova in the final. While Muchova is older by some distance compared to Noskova, it has shown the short comings in the view of Mark Petchey who used to coach Emma Raducanu of the British system.

Emma Raducanu and Jack Draper continued to be sidelined by injuries, while the same fate is befitting of Sonay Kartal. Andy Murray and Dan Evans have retired, Cameron Norrie is still there but hasn't replicated his form. Arthur Fery had a great Wimbledon, but was also plagued by the depiction by some centres that he came from money and is actually French by origin.

Petchey used Czech and Italian tennis as the main barometer when he spoke this week on The Big T Podcast and said that he was critical of the LTA for planning to expand the National Tennis Centre over helping small clubs in effect centralising the cash to one hub instead of helping those perhaps less fortunate to thrive.

“In the UK, our best male players at the moment have come from the clubs or they have come from an academy,” said Petchey. “So for me personally where we’ve gone wrong and when I look at the Czechia system, is that they are really supportive and understand the importance, as do Italy, of the clubs. Their domestic calendar is very strong.

“It’s important to have tournaments at your local club, so the kids can see what the standards are like and get inspired, find idols. On an economic sort of standpoint, money for the tournament goes into the club, food and beverage, a stringer, all of those things are important to me in the ecosystem.

“The more you decentralise, the better it would be for Britain. We had an article just come out in the UK just prior to Wimbledon, which wasn’t our best Wimbledon, and there’s some really great people at the Lawn Tennis Association. There’s also some people that aren’t so great.

“You know they were talking about building a bigger centre and I’m like, well I was anti the centre that went in, in the first place because we don’t have a great pathway from your club, to your region, to London. It’s not big enough. We don’t have enough players coming through. Let’s make the pyramid bigger.

“The only way that you can make the pyramid bigger is understand that the clubs are your training bases. So let’s go and help those coaches. I don’t know what your coaching kind of qualification is in Germany, but because I work with a holiday company, I get a lot of the LTA coaches coming through who want to go into Europe and coach for the summer. And some of the worst coaches I have had have been the most highly qualified, and some of the best coaches I’ve had have been the ones that are literally level one and we go up to level five.

For Petchey he continued that in his view, it would be better if they took the power out of the hands of these centres and then brought people like Petkovic, Brad Gilbert, Darren Cahill to educate the masses to help gain better understanding.

“That’s because they’ve got an unbelievable personality, and my opinion is we would be better off asking people like yourself [Andrea Petkovic], Brad Gilbert, Darren Cahill, to go around the clubs and teach them performance tennis. Not out of a textbook, but feel it. Because those kids and those people with great personalities are the people that are going to create your champions, they are going to create your pipeline of top 100 players, which is the success of any top system is top 100 players coming through consistently.

“We simply don’t have that. We just pull people into a federation situation and then it’s almost then demotivating for those coaches to go and find good players because they lose them very quickly. So when I saw the article that we’re going to go and build a bigger centre, I was like that’s completely the wrong way. And when you look at places like Czechia and Italy, they’ve gone down a different route and I don’t really understand why we wouldn’t go down that route.”

In a culture where British players are given wildcards and often don't do much outside of the Wimbledon system, it perhaps rewards people that it shouldn't and for Petchey having money is a blessing and a curse as having said money also means that failure isn't under a microscopic lens.

"I think having money like we do in the UK is a blessing and a curse, I do think it’s a bit of a poisoned chalice. You can get away with making bad decisions because it doesn’t really hurt you, but when you’ve got to be lean and mean, you don’t have the luxury of making decisions because that money counts and you don’t get a reset 12 months later than you can go.

“So I think that especially in the UK, a lot of it is centralised at the National Tennis Centre and those people are pretty comfortable. There’s nobody coming in to take their spot. It’s very difficult to do it independently away from the federation, there just aren’t enough domestic tournaments. There certainly aren’t enough professional tournaments in the UK for the amount of money that we have.

“So I’m a massive advocate of decentralisation, really backing your coaches in clubs, regardless of the facilities. I believe in pied pipers. I believe that coaches, they may not be the way that you think, but they can create an atmosphere that players want to play. And then if you have enough domestic tournaments on, the cream will rise to the top, eventually you’re going to get proved right or wrong along the way.

“And I think the more you can be hands off trying to dictate who’s going good and who’s going to be bad and support that network of coaches that are out there and help those ones that are in really good places that haven’t been producing players. You can see them. You’re like, ‘This is a great area. This is a wealthy area with lots of kids playing lots of sports. Why are we not producing tennis players?’ It has to come down to the coaching at that point. Go support those people, go and help them with really great advice and that’s what I think Italy and Czechia have done, and you’ve seen the fruits of an investment that has probably been in 15, 20 years, for Czechia it has probably been longer.”

“…Also it goes back to, a lot of people talk about idols and Czechia one of it is that they’ve had good idols, but you know what they’ve had such a big base of players that it isn’t about it, because if it was about idols, Switzerland would have 50 men. There’s no bigger idol than Roger. It’s about the system. It’s about the people that are producing kids to come through. If you don’t have that in place, you can have 20 Roger’s coming through, you’re not going to produce the talent. You’re going to get lucky. Everyone gets lucky. If you’ve got enough people playing, eventually you’re going to get lucky. But there is a way to try and minimise the luck and actually create systems like Czechia and Italy.

“And I don’t understand, when there is a blueprint that is so obviously working, I’m sorry, but why do you not steal it? That just feels like insanity to me. You know, I mean the great artists out there, don’t they? They look at a painting, they borrow certain things, and then they steal it and make it into their own. I’m looking at something going, ‘Well this works. We have money. Why wouldn’t we suddenly go on and put 40 tournaments on in the UK? Why would we not be going around getting the best coaches in the world to go and teach people not out of a textbook, real world actual living proof of what it takes to produce a tennis player and actually make that happen’.

“When I do look at Italy and Czechia and a little envious and we could be doing this but we’re not. Credit to them. Credit to them that they’re humble enough that it feels like they keep everybody that’s played in the system and they want them to be a part of it and it is a rising tide of people that make their country a lot of better. It’s an amazing achievement.”