Monday, October 4, 2010

CommCrap

Yesterday, we talked about Andrey Golubev, who is awesome. Today, we're going to talk about something which is decidedly un-awesome.

That's right, we're talking Commonwealth Games tennis.

Now, I understand why Comm games tennis is so dodge. Not that many awesome players come from the Commonwealth, to begin with. Sure, there's Murray and Stosur, but beyond that...? not so much. And it's at a stupid time for the few awesome players there are, and they have pretty much zero incentive to play, apart from some faint sense of nationalism. So surprise, surprise - guess what? they didn't choose to play. Which leaves us with a draw where Somdev Devvarman and Anastasia Rodionova are the top seeds, essentially rendering it meaningless as any kind of major tennis achievement.

I understand all these things. All these things were predictable things, quite outside of the whole furore with security in Delhi. And this begs the question - why the f*ck is tennis in the Commonwealth Games at all?

I'm a big fan of tennis in the Olympics. But you know what? That's because the field is awesome and people have an incentive to play. No one is really going to come to the Comm games, because it's not a productive use of their time nor is it good for their rankings. Tennis in the Comm games is, quite simply, a big fat waste of time.

I know India put it in in the hopes that Sania Mirza could win a medal. Here's hoping that at the next Comm games, it comes straight back out again, because it is spectacularly useless.

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