The day after Roger Draper, the chief executive of the LTA, said that British tennis is for sale “lock, stock and barrel”, the man in whom he has invested more than most federations see in a lifetime delivered a withering assessment of its value to potential investors.
In his autobiography, Hitting Back, published on the eve of the grass-court season on which the sport depends, Andy Murray writes: “Someone in authority at British tennis should come out and say, ‘Look, we’re doing really badly. We’re not good enough. We must make some changes.’ But everyone is being really unrealistic with goals: things like, ‘We’re going to get eight players in the top 100 by 2008 and then it changed to seven players in the top