This week on The First Serve, host Brett Phillips was joined by Craig Tyzzer, the coach of WTA world number one Ash Barty, as well as former player Jeremy Delaney and Rob Brandham from Evolve Sports Physio.
Host Brett Phillips believes the opportunity for Serena Williams to equal Margaret Court's grand slam record has passed.
"The opportunity for mine has absolutely passed her to equal Margaret Court's record of 24 majors. Seven wins in a fortnight is just not achievable now. I think there's enough evidence to just put this one to bed and on Saturday she turns 39 years of age, I think it's just going to be too big of an ask," Phillips said.
Former Australian futures player Jeremy Delaney joined the show to provide his thoughts on grassroots tennis in Australia and the surface of courts and clubs in the country.
"You look at especially on the mens side, all the dominant players over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years have come out of Europe, and they've grown up on clay. Clay is obviously a slower surface that teaches you from a young age how to move properly on a tennis court. It teaches you how to construct points, there are far longer rallies on it, it also teaches you patience, all of what the faster surfaces that predominantly in our country don't teach you. There's minimal help from the surface when playing on clay versus say a faster synthetic grass, where you hit a flat ball on synthetic grass, the point is over, it's as simple as that. You've got a good serve on a fast surface, it's all about the serve, it's not about constructing points and really thinking about what you're doing and I think that's really reflective in the lack of world class players that this country has produced over the last ten to fifteen years. We've got a few players with really good potential but they haven't been able to really come through especially on those slower surfaces," Delaney said.
"You rarely see a tennis club in Europe that is run down, whereas you can see them here by the dozen. It seems synthetic grass has just been thrown in and then left to rot away. I think that's the idea, we lay this, there's no maintenance then we just hire out the courts for the next twenty years and we're done. In Europe, there's a lot of pride taken in these clubs, a lot of the clubs over there have a bistro, they have a bar, it's a real social community. I spent quite a bit of time over there, just coming back here and not seeing that community environment that I was getting over there is a real shame and there's absolutely no reason why we cannot have that here. We've got the weather, I think we've got people that are keen fans and players of the game. We should be thriving here, the game should be thriving here, but I think certainly the powers to be have something to answer for as to why it's not," Delaney stated.
Craig Tyzzer, the coach of Ash Barty joined the show to talk about the decision not to play the US Open and Roland Garros.
"I think initially we were just a bit unsure about the seriousness of this and where it was going to go. I guess for me personally, initially it was nice just to be home for a while. I quite enjoyed that stage of just being home, spending time with the family but the amount of time now, we've really gone wow this is a lot of tennis we've missed, a lot of this year we've missed and we'd certainly like to be back into it and playing now," Tyzzer said.
Tyzzer explained why Barty made the call not to travel to the US Open and Roland Garros to defend her title:
"The US one we initially made just totally on health and safety. We just didn't know what the circumstances were going to be like playing over there and especially for us in Australia, the travel is a big part of it. We have to fly to different countries before we get to the US and then travel domestically through the US as well. So the risks and the numbers that they were crunching in the US at that stage was a big no no for us. You know, is it worth flying over there to not know if we were going to play, if we get the opportunity to play and then also knowing once we were on the road, we were on the road because we couldn't come back to Australia without having to quarantine again. So the US one was a fairly easy one for us in that sense, it was totally just for our health and safety, we just want to avoid that," Tyzzer explained.
"So then we looked at the European swing, because Ash has been in touch with quite a few of the girls in Europe and they were operating okay, things seemed to be going well, so then we planned on almost a two month training block to try and get ready to head over to play Madrid, Rome and then the French Open. Sort of in the process of looking, we tried for an exemption for the quarantine, so that I could actually just be on court with Ash for the time of coaching stuff, not do anything else but out on court. By the time we got through that process, the numbers in Victoria hit really high, this is when we hit the start of the second wave and I think we got really close to getting across the line and approved and then it got knocked on the head, so it would've meant that I would've had to gone 14 days in hard lockdown quarantine, which would've meant Ash was put behind with her training. She could've done some training but she didn't want to go ahead without me being there and not knowing where she was at tennis wise, it would've been difficult, so that sort of almost made the decision for her, and especially Madrid got cancelled in that time period too. So then she went well I'm going to have maybe Rome beforehand and then have to go and defend the French Open title, am I going to be ready with limited preparation? So she just decided for all those reasons that she'd take the rest of this year off," Tyzzer said.
Rob Brandham from Evolve Sports Physio joined the show to talk in detail about the knee, specifically the patellar tendon.
Make sure to tune into the full edition of the show to catch the full interviews with Jeremy Delaney and Craig Tyzzer, as well as Rob Brandham's insight into the patellar tendon injury.
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