So on Sunday, courtesy of a sponsorship deal at work, I got to go along to Superset Tennis at Wembley Arena. I must admit that I hate travelling to and from Wembley, but on Sunday, aside from my local train service being a bus for the day (and thus making it quicker to catch a proper bus that doesn’t attempt to follow a railway line’s route, and then getting a tube), I actually got to Wembley very quickly.
The idea of Superset tennis is that a short tournament is played out over one day with individual fixtures being a single set each. So in the afternoon you have four sets of tennis – the quarterfinals effectively. Then in the evening, two semi-finals and a final. They play for a quarter of a million – winner takes all (apart from the unmentioned appearance fees of course).
The website says that it features “8 of the world’s best players”. Well, up to a point Lord Copper. Actually we did get a decent selection of players, with Greg Rusedski, young Andrew Murray who won the US junior boys, and pros like Mario Ancic (who won the tournament) and Tommy Robrede. On top of these we got crowd pleasers like Goran Ivanesevic, Boris Becker and a very impressive John McEnroe. I took loads of photos from our courtside seats so I’m looking forward to gettting a decent “Mac” shot blown up. Tim Henman would have been playing but was injured after last week’s Davis Cup defeat.
Other differences were Boxing/Wrestling style intros, on-court coaches (with Greg having Paul McKenna – who seemingly has helped Greg in the past, although I’m not sure what help he could be during a tennis match. McEnroe had the far more obviously helpful Peter Fleming on his bench), and the liberal use of Hawkeye to check whether balls were in or out. Players were allowed to call on Hawkeye for disputed line calls. It worked pretty well, but I’m not altogether convinced about the how accurate it really is. An example: the sets start with a “Serve to serve” competition, whereby each competitor serves to balls as close as possible to the “T” in the opposite court – closest serve wins. Well it was never quite explained to us whether “out” balls counted if they were close, but one serve hit the net and bounced well long into the back of the court. Yet when Hawkeye was presented to determine the winner, the ball was shown landing in the the service court, following its original trajectory. Very wrong in otherwords. Probably not surprising given the way Hawkeye’s used in cricket where you’re trying to determine where the ball would have gone if a leg hadn’t got in the way, but it just goes to show that technology does not yet rule.
So there was lots of music between points, and some matches went on to scores like 11-9 since you can’t really employ tie-breaks too soon in a one set match. We had to endure some dreadful all-girl “urban” act who mimed away on court. But overall it was a pretty good day with some great tennis.
Rich from work was umpire for a large part of it which was fun to see, particularly when they made him put on a baseball cap back to front for the final, and there was no fine netting at either end of the court which meant that if you were in those seats, you had tennis balls coming at you at well over a hundred miles an hour. Greg must have been gutted to lose the final to Ancic!