Danger Deep Water – Adventures in words and ideas
There’s many things I love about the pithy and insightful Mark Petchey as a tennis commentator and no doubt it says more about me than it does about him that I get irritated with him for referring to ‘The big four’ rather than ‘The big three’. He includes Andy Murray in that list of modern titans of tennis which as a former coach of Murray’s you might expect him to do. But with just three grand slam titles to Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal’s twenty and Novak Djokovic’s eighteen, as of April 2021, Murray doe
Given Djokovic’s overwhelming dominance at the Australian Open, you might think that he looks likely to add to his tally. And in the autumn of 2020 Nadal did not lose a set on his way to winning his 13th French Open, and will be favourite to win the event again when it is played, probably in early June. But at the ATP Tour Finals in London in November 2020, both Nadal and Djokovic were beaten by Dominic Thiem and Daniil Medvedev. At the Monte Carlo Open in April 2021, Djokovic was beaten by Dan Evans who wa