Comments on Regentville Tennis Blog: Maria Sharapova in Singapore

i have been in this game for 25 years and seen sin...

2008-01-02T00:27:00.000+08:00

i have been in this game for 25 years and seen singapore tennis develop from lela zainal to now...

i think its a wrong idea of getting a country's number 1 player to be a line offical or ball person is encouraging. what kind of exposure are you talking about? a player is always a player. the organising body should explore them by getting professional players to conduct workshops or hitting sessions for our players. this would be so much more encouraging rather then getting them to sit on a chair and call the lines or running and chasing around around for the yellow ball which is not their forte.

i have been a line official for the Spore Henieken Open. if you ask me how do our line officials perform during the MSL match? i can tell you is.. below standard.. line calls are not loud enough, and wrost still, out balls are not even call or signal.. you think 2 practise sessions is is enough to do a good job at a tennis match with 9k spectators? no way man... and STA got their bunch of umpires who are all qualify... i think they should fix the bill better.. get the right person to do the right job.

pardon me, everybody's entitled to his/her opinion.

I was a photographer, courtside at the event. So h...

2008-01-01T16:25:00.000+08:00

I was a photographer, courtside at the event. So happens I do know some of the players from a previous interaction. Even though they might not have performed as well as the Wimbledon ballboys or girls, I still feel that we should not denouce them so harshly. They only had 2 training sessions prior to the game. Just to let you know, there was a trained ball boy who participated in the Australian Open 2006 there. But he was put in the duty of linesmen. The more experienced players served the role as linesmen whereas the younger ones were the ballboys/girls. This is an opporutinity at exposure for them, and it's the first time for practically everyone. So I feel that we should actually encourage them rather than criticise them. Did you not forget Sylvester Wee's confident call of 'out'? Furthermore, Grand Slam events have courtside microphones, hence the calls are amplified. Like you mentioned, this is only an exhibition match. There were hence no microphones. From my position, the calls were rather audible in fact. I feel that we should rather give our full support to the Singapore tennis youths. Only then will the slogan, "Team Singapore, 4 million strong" be a truth.