Roger and out

The Davis Cup defeat was just another nail in the coffin for the disgraced Lawn Tennis Association but there is only one man who should shoulder this burden.

That man is LTA Chief Executive Roger Draper.

The former Sports England CEO was appointed in February 2006 following a series of failures within the British game.

Now, four year on his job will be on the line for the same reasons ... and more.

When he began his reign the top of the game was in decent shape with Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski and a young and exciting Andy Murray all inside the top 50.

Underneath that was where the problems lay, with only Alex Bogdanovic ranked within the world’s top 150 and five others around the 300 mark.

This forced the LTA into a review of the game and triggered the appointment of a young and exuberant Draper.

The 36-year-old had big plans to make Britain a successful force within tennis. Although insisting that the process will take around ten years to come to fruition, he did note that there would be results along the way.

He may have been right in term of women’s tennis but on the men’s side it has gone from bad to worse.

In some ways you could say Draper was unlucky, with both Rusedski and Henman retiring, leaving Murray to be the solitary figure at the top of the British game.

However when you match up all the statistics now, to what he targeted at the beginning of his tenure, you then realise that this man has made little improvement to the men’s game.
Before his appointment we were in a worrying situation, but now the game is in complete disarray.

Minus Murray we were promised four others within the top 100 by 2012, this looks very unlikely, as we have just three players inside the world top 300 – to less than in 2006.

And that is just the failures on the elite side. At the junior level, he outlined that we would try to match the likes of France and Spain and have around 500,000 juniors participating in the sport. This looks to be another target that has massively fallen short with only 30,000 children to have picked up a racket.

Money

The one thing Draper will be remember for, if he is to be sacked, is his failure to input the vast amounts of money available to him in the correct areas.

We realised what he was all about when he sent a number of his backroom staff to Buenos Aries to ‘support’ the Great Britain team for their World Group play off tie against Argentina, which they lost.

Since that day on he has spent the money on the top end rather than the bottom end. Instead of pumping the money through the grassroots he has piled it on a batch of elite players that the majority are undeserved of it.

His inadequacy in funding was highlighted furthermore in building the LTA’s new head quarters at the National tennis centre. Although an incredible facility for our countries best it is fundamentally a waste of money when that could have gone towards thousands of mistreated tennis clubs and centres across Britain.

If Roger Draper was a manager or chairman of a football club and he wasted the resources like he has done and in return only getting back poor results, he would sacked within a flash.

Why should tennis be any different? We know where the problem lies. It is just left for the LTA to put two and two together - get rid and move on. It is the only way.