Mana Games

[btaylor]

In my opinion they need to do away with all of this f**kin' coaching during matches on the WTA tour if they are not going to implement it on the ATP tour as well...

Actually I'm not in favor of it one way or the other, but what in the hell makes the women so "special!?"

Not trying to be chauvinistic here, but are most of the women either too stupid or too mentally fragile to be able to figure things out for themselves?

Case in point:
I watched a match today (5/7/09) between the current #1 player Safina Dinara vs. Maria Jose Martinez-Sanchez...

Martinez-Sanchez won the first set 6/4 by intelligently mixing things up by using timely dropshots, serve & volley, big looping topspin forehands, etc, to negate Safina's mindless power game...

She had Safina totally baffled, and was up a break in the second set as well, UNTIL Safina's coach got involved...
Mind you, all the while that Martinez-Sanchez was sucessfully implementing her game plan, SHE did so WITHOUT A COACHES INPUT...

It is very likely that Safina WOULD HAVE LOST this match if left to her own devices...It was EXTREMELY unfair to Martinez-Sanchez for her to have lost today through sideline cheating...er, coaching...

Interestingly enough, commentator Leif Shiras harped on and on about how AMAZING Safina's comeback was (as if she engineered it herself) and how she miraculously "came through" like a real #1 should, never once mentioning her use of a crutch...er, coach...

Back in the day, the Everts, Navratilovas, Grafs, Seles' and more currently Henin and the Williams' handled their business without the "crutch" of having a coach on the sidelines...(incidently ALL of these women spent quite some time at the #1 position in their careers.)
I didn't mention Her Royal Screechness, mostly because her lunatic-ass father is ALWAYS trying to get her attention whenever SHE is struggling...

Why in the hell should the current #1 player (for the moment) be so mentally fragile as to HAVE to rely on cheating..er, coaching to get her through against a much lower ranked opponent...

Think about it, I'll bet that there's a helluva lot of mens' players on the ATP Tour that benefited from her brother Marat's not having a coach on the sidelines to "chill" him out, or to provide tactics...(hardly ever did he "lose it" while playing Davis Cup with a coach nearby.)

Though I'm certainly not in favor of it, if the top players can afford to have their coaches come out to "help" them with their tactics (if the poor darlings lose their way) why not provide coaches (kind of like a court-appointed attorney) for those lower ranked players who can't afford to fly their own coaches around to all the tournaments...THEN they at LEAST would have the option...

Better still...as my topic title says, leave the sideline coaching only for Davis, Fed, and Hopman cups as well as World Team Tennis....

[Leena]

Not trying to be chauvinistic here, but are most of the women either too stupid or too mentally fragile to be able to figure things out for themselves?

Yes.

I'd be for coaching... BUT, the problem is that the higher ranked players can afford better coaches, and thus there's not a fair playing field there. Top players already have an advantage that can afford traveling a team around to give signals during matches...

[btaylor]

I know that the higher ranked players can afford "better" coaches, and their personal coaches know all of the little quirks and what not that it takes to motivate their spoiled little charges...however, even if the lower ranked players only had a coach that was "supplied" by the WTA it maybe could help them a little bit when they are so wrapped up in the heat of battle that they can't see the forest for the trees...

How many times have we watched a televised match and WE at home (that KNOW tennis) can CLEARLY see what the player SHOULD be doing, or if they have deviated from an otherwise effective game plan?

This ain't rocket science here, folks, even a WTA appointed coach that could be a second set of "eyes" could keep his/her player abreast of what is going on in the match, in effect, if they are employing a winning or losing strategy...

All this having been said, I'm still in NO WAY for sideline coaching in the least...BUT if we absolutely MUST have it, it should be on some kind of "fairer" basis...

Listen, we've all seen coaches give signals from the stands over the years, but even THAT'S not like having an in-depth dialogue about how to change a losing strategy...hell, Safina's coach did everything short of taking the racquet out of her hands to play the match himself...

I know that both tours have been experimenting with ways to make the pro game more entertaining for the fans (music, smacking autographed balls into the stands, and now sideline coaching) but I'd rather that tennis returned to the one on one game of matching brawn and brains that it used to be...Alas, I guess that'll never happen, though...