London: The fall-out from Britain's Davis Cup flop in Lithuania has reached the corridors of political power with a group of tennis-loving Members of Parliament and peers examining the state of the sport.
Britain's lack of success has long been a source of embarrassment and now the All-Party Parliamentary Tennis Group, which brings together members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, is gathering evidence to try and find out where it is all going wrong.
"There clearly are critics out there who have got a view that things aren't going well," Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said from Vancouver where he is attending the Paralympics.
"This is an opportunity for the LTA (British Lawn Tennis Association) to set out its stall, for the all-party group to interview those people with an alternative or opposing point of view and then for a positive result to come out from that to go back to the LTA and say where potential gaps may be."
The defeat by Lithuania, a nation with just three world-ranked players, all of them teenagers, two weeks ago sparked fierce debate about the LTA's failure to produce top-level performers.
Apart from world number four Andy Murray, who spent his formative years training in Spain, Britain has no other men in the top 150 of the ATP rankings.
Sutcliffe supports the all-party group while the much-maligned LTA said it welcomed the chance to show how it was spending some of its 50 million pounds-plus ($75.83 million) annual budget on grassroots tennis.
The sports minister was critical of British tennis last year when nine out of 10 home players lost in the first round of Wimbledon.
Bureau Report
First Published: Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 09:54