Change is a feature of everyday life and, like it or loathe it, we all have to embrace it. With Wimbledon having just drawn to a close, it seemed perhaps timely to indulge ourselves with a tennis theme.
The link between these two points is change. In the technology dominated, hurry-hurry, disposable world in which we all live and work, Wimbledon for me is one of the last bastions of tradition. It provides the comfort blanket of tennis – strawberries and cream, Alan Mills and the reassuringly distinguished purple and green livery.
But it’s amazing just how much technology has stealthily crept into the game and altered it, not always for the better. On the one hand I am all for the technology that helps get the decisions right on line calls. In this modern age of tennis, the number of balls that are precisely played to the line is unreal. We all saw the effect that human error can have on a match with the Greg Rusedski outburst. And while the glowing plasma lectern for post-match analysis on the nightly highlights was a bit of a shock this year, we will all get used to it, just like we did the magic eye before it.
But I am much less in favour of the parallel development in racquet and ball technology. Endless streams of 120mph-plus aces and a chorus of grunting is not spectator sport. There is of course much debate currently about putting artistry back into the game and making it less one-dimensional. When the skills of top seeds like Agassi are crushed by a steamroller of supersonic serves, all agree that something needs to be done to rescue tennis from tedium. The game has changed and it’s called progress but I don’t think that fluffier balls hold all the answers.
Of course, things were never going to be the same when they stopped making racquets out of wood.
