A new subforum created to discuss Sania Mirza. As a lot of the other tennis player threads were getting overloaded, thus a new forum to discuss Sania Mirza
After checking that 2 of our juniors have made it to the 2nd round of the Aus Open, I just had a thought.....has anybody ever wondered why our juniors seem to do so well compared to the seniors ?
We all know how well Leander did at the juniors..infact wasn't he the top junior at one time ? You move on to so many others like Sourav Panja, even Sunil Kumar a while back....they all have decent results in the slams. Why is it then that all of them fade away with time ? Can't be a coincidence, something is wrong somewhere....surely commom sense suggests that these guys should at least be reasonable in the senior circuit.....
There are several factors why Indian juniors who are doing well end up not doing well in the senior level:
- There is a big jump in the skill level and mental toughness needed in the senior level than in the junior level
- There is a big jump in the physical game (powerful groundstrokes, serves, etc.) as you move up
- The top juniors (17 and 18 years old) are already playing the Futures, Challengers, and some ATP events and not playing the junior circuit full time and hence their junior ranking is misleading.
- Moving into the senior level requires money (sponsorship), proper coaching, a part-time or full time traveling coach, proper planning for the whole year, some wild cards to enter into Challengers and ATP tournaments and earning some points to raise your ranking, luck (not meeting seeded players always in the first round), etc
I am sure that there are other factors also that are holding back our top juniors from doing well in the senior circuit.
Let us hope that Sania, Karan, etc will break the mold and move from the junior to the senior ranks and make some waves!
This is actually a topic that has come up many times in the former forum also, and is one of the favorite complaints of a lot of tennis fans. On the surface it looks very reasonable, but it is really not as correct as it seems to be.
The most important thing is that the junior rankings should not be taken similar to senior rankings. The pool of players that a junior is competing against is something like 5 to 10 times smaller than the pool you are ranked against in the seniors. The reason is that the average period of junior play is only a year and half or so, effectively, and sometimes as little as a year for some of the really talented players. The top-100 players in the ATP tour play inside the top-300 or so pretty much a decade. So, we are comparing apples and oranges with the senior and junior rankings.
Very difficult to objectively make clear conclusions on this. A junior top-10 or top-5 is perhaps a shoe-in for a future top-100 or so, and perhaps a handful from the junior top-25 or so reach the top-100 later. That's about it. It just means that only about 15 or 20 kids in the world rankings, most of them in the top-15 or so, ever reach top-100.
India has really not had anybody in the top-20 since Leander, except Nitin Kirtane. You can find other countries which have had a couple like that in the last decade; not just India.
Also, you can find somebody like a Nirupama who was only just inside the top 50 in the juniors coming up better in the seniors with a ranking as high as around #140 .. Or a Bopanna who hardly did anything in the juniors potentially going inside the top-200 or better sometime in the future.
Sunil Kumar was just about getting inside the top-50 at the best points, till his very last tournament where he won the Asian juniors against a relatively weaker field than other tournaments giving similar points, and went up to #30. That is not the type junior performance that indicates future top-100, though I am hopeful that he has it in him to go that high in the future.
Sania Mirza is just inside the top-30 right now and if she plays juniors seriously a little longer, could possibly go inside the top-15 and that would be an indication of something inside the top-100, may be.
Winning a round or two in the grand slam juniors does not mean that you will do that in the seniors. Most kids look at 4 or 5 junior grand slams, and they compete for some 30 or 40 in the seniors. Eexcept Sunil reaching the QF in one of the 5 or so grand slams he played, none from India has gone even two rounds in a long long time. So our senior GS performance and junior GS performance don't show much mismatch either.
I am not saying that our junior-to-senior transition is on par with all the rest of the countries. In general we do seem to do slightly worse, despite my above arguments. The reason for this is to some extent the coaches and courts in India. We don't have too many world-class claycourts, and our coaches tend to teach a lot of shotmaking tennis, rather than the baseline-machine tennis. Indians generally do have a flair for shotmaking and that works a lot more in the juniors than the seniors. Plus, we tend not to churn out too many power players for the seniors, and quite a few of our players are able to win in the juniors without power, due to the court craft and other things.
However what hurts the most is that despite tennis being a popular sport in India, we do not produce enough world class players. Living in Calcutta, I can tell you that tennis is huge, and the response to local and state tournaments is fantastic. What is even more encouraging is that it is no longer restricted to the so called 'middle class', with even youngsters from less fortunate households showing amazing potential. I do take part in some of these tournaments myself...(though i keep getting hammered.. )..however what I realise is that some of our juniors..in fact, a lot of our juniors are hugely talented. It's the next step upwards thats the problem. I think we have to look at some sort of solution...I agree with your points, but even with a reasonable base of talented juniors, we are still a long way away from producing even 1 top 150 player. I think that these juniors must all be sent abroad for training, otherwise ther are just gonna fade away....
Ah, one of the pet theories that I tend to never let go without a response. This is not just your opinion. The whole country seems to think this and what is interesting is that everybody thinks that the others don't think that way. Well, count me different. I don;t think Indians have any killer instinct problems. If they are good, they have the killer instinct. LP when he is good, has killer instinct. When he is not good, he doesn't. There is nothing to this. It is just that India has not had many sportsmen right at the top, in terms of skill, coaching, and sometimes physique/ stamina - Due to a whole host of reasons, the biggest being coaching and proper advice along with facilities and other things.
A lot of our national heros are simply not that good. So when they lose after some super effort on their part, we blame them for the killer instinct problem. It is us who start hyping our players so much that we expect that they should be doing so much more. When they look good for a while and then get beaten by somebody at the top, we claim they don't have killer instinct. Nobody said this about LP-MB when they were at their best. Everybody saw killer instinct in them. They looked bad last year and we said the killer instinct was gone.
Nobody said the Indian hockey team had no killer instinct when they were winning the Olympic golds by the truckloads a few decades back.
There is nothing particularly lacking there as far as killer instinct is concerned. There is indeed a problem about many Indian sportsmen being so deeply affected by this national psyche that constantly doubts their killer instinct (our cricket team is a prime example). It puts so much pressure on them and it has often made it worse at pressure points.
)..however what I realise is that some of our juniors..in fact, a lot of our juniors are hugely talented. It's the next step upwards thats the problem. I think we have to look at some sort of solution...I agree with your points, but even with a reasonable base of talented juniors, we are still a long way away from producing even 1 top 150 player. I think that these juniors must all be sent abroad for training, otherwise ther are just gonna fade away....