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| Bolton Wanderers in hurry for Owen Coyle Bolton Wanderers are increasingly confident that they will be able to appoint Owen Coyle as their new manager today, but Burnley are holding out for £3 million in compensation. feeds.timesonline.co.uk |
'Just hating to lose isn't enough' In 2009 he became the world No 2 – but he remains a prickly, combative character. Starting with this month's Australian Open, Andy Murray tells OSM he won't be happy until he's winning grand slams (yes, more than one) and taking down Roger and RafaInterviewing tennis players is not totally unlike playing against them. Responding to questions is as much part of their daily routine from an early age as hitting a few hundred topspin backhands – they face a mandatory press conference after each match and every one of them has long since worked out his own style. I sat with Lleyton Hewitt, all Aussie bustle and restlessness, for a breathless 45 minutes once and the answer to each question had come back at me almost before it was out of my mouth – and the next? Andre Agassi was another fast returner, intense and gnomic, quickly on to everything and returning it with bemusing spin. McEnroe: scarily intelligent. Henman: eager to please. Safin: comatose. Federer: charming, perfectly unreachable.Andy Murray is a frustrating opponent. His body language, as on court, seems completely at odds with his intent. He is a consistently unsettling mixture of ill-at-ease and supremely confident, affable and truculent, brittle and boyish. No response is much more than obvious yet each one seems born of some internal struggle. He offers the impression of great introspection but he gives next to nothing of that insight away. Talking about tennis is not his favourite thing, but then it often seems that playing it is not a joyful undertaking either. I ask at one point about the various intimidatory affectations of other players – Nadal's cap-sleeves, Federer's golden bag, and wonder if he has anything similar in his locker. "No," he says, "you just always want to give them the impression that if they are to try to beat you it's not going to be easy and it may take four or five hours and that you are not going to give anything away." I have a sense that many of his opponents will have given up before they tie their shoelaces. I understand the feeling.When we met, just before the season-ending Masters series at London's O2, Murray was a few days away from publicly splitting from his girlfriend of four years, Kim Sears. We talked a little about their relationship and he did not give a flicker of a hint that things were not all they might have been. Kim doesn't travel very much with you, I suggested. Is that a problem?"No," Murray said. "I mean, we are still young so it is good to spend a bit of time apart. And she is obviously at university. I think it works fine; it has done for a long time now."As well as being an English literature undergraduate at Sussex, Kim is the daughter of WTA coach Nigel Sears, and has the game very much in her blood; is she a good person to talk tennis with, I wondered."I never talk tennis with her," Murray said. "Or with anyone too much. It's the whole year for me. You are always talking about yourself and tennis and how you are feeling. I try to avoid it when I don't have to."The subsequent reports of the detail of Sears moving out of Murray's £5.4m house in Oxshott, Surrey suggested that one of the reasons she had given to "friends" was Murray's PlayStation habit. Brad Gilbert, his former coach, once said that Murray might spend "seven hours a day" on his consoling console. The addiction is not that unusual among tennis players – Federer once told me how he used to sometimes have all-night videogame sessions, often playing tennis games, either using a "Federer" avatar, or using a rival, Nadal, and seeing how it felt to play against himself. He confided how his then girlfriend, Mirka, now his wife, managed eventually to "get him motivated for things apart from tennis and PlayStation", but it was a struggle. Sears, it might appear, has not been so lucky.The nugget of insight into the Scot adds to the impression he gives of being wrapped up in his own head. Tennis, with its focus on the individual and its mix of explosive action and neurotic inaction, tests each player's social skills; Murray, it's easy to imagine, internalises such pressures more than most. One of the unusual things about his development as a player is that he was always among the best boys in his age group from eight or nine onwards. Most prominent players in the men's game have emerged in their teens rather than before the age of 10 – as if the cumulative pressure on prodigies is too great.When I speak to Murray, the memoirs of another driven child – and tortured soul – Andre Agassi, are in the news. Did the American's account of his relationship with the game at which he made his fortune ("I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop, and still I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life") strike a chord?Murray says he has not read Agassi's book, though he seems to know its detail. "I never hated the game as such," he says, "though obviously there are some things that you miss out on; I went over to Barcelona to train when I was 14, 15. I was away from the family at quite a young age – good in some ways. I can totally understand how parents who are very pushy take the enjoyment out of it, but that was not my experience."Knowing how his mother Judy, the Scottish national tennis coach, nurtured Murray and his brother Jamie in the game almost as soon as they could walk, you could begin to think that this answer is too easy, but Murray seems happy with it. How does he get along with the loneliness of the sport, of everything being down to him?"Sometimes it is like that," he says, "but it just being you is also what you love about it. In team sports you don't necessarily get the blame for a defeat pushed on to you – it's the linesman or the manager or whatever. In tennis it is never the coach's fault, it is always just you."For perfectionists and control freaks, as great tennis players invariably are, that fact brings its own challenges. As a younger player it always looked like the fear of losing for Murray was more a motivating force than the joy of victory – I wonder if that is still the case for him now?"You need to love winning," he says, as if he as adopted that as a mantra. "You can't just hate losing. It's too negative." Nevertheless, that need to cope more easily with defeat is one thing that he feels he has learned about his game. "When I first came on the tour it was so different to what I was used to with the juniors. You don't expect to win. Whereas this year I have played 16 tournaments and won six. But you still lose 10, 12 times a year. Even Federer will have lost 10 or more times this year. You have to get used to that."In Federer's case, I suggest, in recent years those defeats have often come against Murray. He immediately produces the statistic: "We have played each other nine times and I've won six." (The record, after their battle in the ATP finals, is now 6-4.) How does it feel to have something of a hold over the greatest player who ever lived?He nearly smiles. It's something of a boost, he suggests. "They are the matches you want to play, big courts and the best players. That's why you play. I've never felt nervous in front of big crowds and in big stadiums. I never just wanted to be 200th in the world or something, I wanted to be at the top."Whether Murray will make it all the way to No 1 may well be answered in the next year. He's always said, given his body and conditioning and the time it has taken to fill out as an athlete, he would be playing his best tennis from about the ages of 23 to 26. He's coming into that age at the same time as a number of others, though. Rafa Nadal is 23, Novak Djokovic, who has been Murray's rival for nearly a decade, is 22, Juan MartÃn Del Potro, the US Open champion, is 21."Everyone is still improving so it's really a question of who improves the most and the quickest," he says. "There is a lot of respect between all of us in that top bunch because we all know how tough it is. Rafa and Roger are two of the best players of all time and could easily go on to be the two best ever. To play at a time when they are around obviously makes things difficult but it also makes your achievements mean more. That's why you put the work in."Former champions can often identify the heirs to their achievements long before mere mortals – they can see exactly the game and the mind-set that is required. It's perhaps significant that both Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe have suggested that Murray has the singularity of temperament in particular to go all the way. When I first watched him, it seemed that he had modelled some of his game on McEnroe's, the improvisation and the tactical awareness within a set, as well as the scowl and the hair. He claims he never really watched those old matches, apart from the famous Wimbledon tie-break and so on, but does acknowledge something of a similarity in their styles – touch players in the land of power, making it up as they go along.As with McEnroe, you wonder a lot, watching Murray play, where that irrepressible need to win comes from. He often seems to be playing demons as much as his opponents, though he insists he is not. There is, of course, the unfathomable effect of Dunblane, and his proximity to the 1996 massacre – he was barricaded in the headmaster's study when Thomas Hamilton was shooting his schoolmates – but I've been warned by his PR man that he will close down the interview if I ask about it. There is also the break-up of his parents' marriage when he was nine – the year after Dunblane – about which his father broke silence at Wimbledon last year.Murray himself has hardly spoken about his reaction to his mother leaving the family home except to say once: "One of the things I would have loved to have had was a family that worked better together..." His tennis game – fostered by his mother – really started to come together about the same time as she left, though, and it would be easy to suggest that he played to try to hold things together. Was he conscious of that?"No kid wants their parents to break up and I was no different," he says. "But I don't know that I played for either of them. I always wanted to make them proud. I mean, my parents still find it unbelievable that both my brother and I play on the main tour – two kids from Dunblane, what are the chances of that?"When his dad talked to the media for the first time last year, was that with his blessing?"No," he says, rubbing his hands through his hair. "Obviously you try to keep as much of your private life as private as you can. You would rather not see too many things about your parents in the papers. The last couple of years I stopped reading the papers altogether – it's exciting at the start, and most of it is quite positive. But then you say a couple of wrong things and stuff is made out of it, and you can't get your side of things across. It's better just to leave it with the tennis."Murray's alone-ness on the tour has been emphasised by the absence of other British challengers at most tournaments. He speaks a little ruefully of how at any time "the French guys will go out to dinner with the French guys and the Spaniards with the Spaniards, but there aren't too many Brits – so I tend to always go out with the guys I work with [physio and agent and so on]". In the past he had Tim Henman for company (who styled his dining partner, affectionately, as a "miserable git") but now he mostly stays within his team.In a half-hearted effort to reach out, he has started twittering recently, mostly about his training schedule or his fantasy football team. He finds it a much easier way to get his point across, he says, than in his media commitments."People say to me, 'You don't seem that interested in interviews,'" he suggests, towards the end of our interview. "Well, you know, I'm not, often. I'm not going to talk tactics with the press, so you are left with talking about how you are feeling; for me, it is not the most interesting thing to be doing."How is he feeling about 2010, I wonder.He hopes it's going to be his year, he says.Andy MurrayAustralian OpenTennisTim Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Venetia Williams will always be in debt to the National after her 100-1 winner Herefordshire trainer prepares her shock winner for reappearance at Haydock on SaturdayThe black cast-iron gates that span the entrance to Venetia Williams' stables on the banks of the River Wye, between ÂHereford and Ross-on-Wye, aren't usually wedged open. But once you've trained the winner of the world's most famous race, something changes forever.Some find the attention that inevitably comes with winning the Grand National easy to manage. Some revel in it. Williams seems instead to be slightly embarrassed by it all, while still finding it a source of genuine but quiet satisfaction.Private by nature, she has in the past been perceived as being cold. But it is through her warm relationships with her owners, combined with her skilful placing of often moderate horses, that Williams has been able to build up her training operation over the course of the last 14 years from two or three horses to having 100 boxes. Whether she likes or not, the 100-1 National winner Mon Mome has put her in the big league."I suppose that in the past I would Âprobably have felt intimidated by this sort of thing," she said. "For a long time I'm not sure that it would have felt justified. But I know why you guys are here now. Like anyone in racing, you're only ever one race away from a disappointment, for owners, for staff or myself. However I Âsuppose I am now able to deal with those sort of things better now."My biggest ambition when I started training was to win the Grand National. We've got Gold Cups and our other big races, but the National is the one that I really wanted."It was amazing, fantastic and Âwonderful. The pinnacle of my career so far. It's been quite a helpful calling card too. We've had two or three new people come and get involved in the yard. It's opened the door for a few conversations. It's also something that you can always have to keep you going during the tougher times."Williams can still, on occasion, be Âfrustratingly defensive. Asked which of her extensive team of staying Âchasers – which as of earlier this month again includes ÂAtouchbetweenacara, Flintoff and Stan after the owner Paul Beck moved them back to her yard after an Âunsuccessful stint with Tim Vaughan – will be entered for this year's race, she says she doesn't know.She has less than a fortnight in which to make up her mind, with the closing date for the Aintree race coming up on Â2 February.Williams is considerably more Âexpansive when explaining why all of the horses she trains are turned out for most of the day in one of the many railed paddock areas dotted throughout the fields around the stables."They are some of the dirtiest horses you will see, because as soon as they are turned out the first thing they want to do is have a roll in the mud, but that's good for them," she said."The last thing you want to do is have a horse working for one hour a day and getting his circulation going and then standing in his box for the other 23 hours. No wonder horses trained like that get injuries. I don't really believe in traditional grooming – I think a lot of it is absolute rubbish."The last couple of weeks have tested Williams' patience but she had a winner at Southwell yesterday and Mon Mome is set to make his next appearance in the Peter Marsh Chase at Haydock on Saturday. He is not just there to sign autographs."I was rather worried when he went to racecourse for the first time this season because he might have thought that all he had to do was show up, ponce around the paddock a couple of times, have his Âphotograph taken, do a couple of pony rides and then go home," she admitted."But he ran very well over hurdles at Cheltenham last month. He knows he is very much a racehorse now and not a show pony."Horse racingVenetia WilliamsWill Haylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Elena Baltacha given a tennis lesson by Dinara Safina at Australian Open Elena Baltacha’s heartening run at the Australian Open came to an end as Dinara Safina showed just why she is ranked the world’s second best female player with a performance that underlined the difference between good performers and excellent ones. feeds.timesonline.co.uk |
Halftime: Apologizing becoming a key athletic move These days, there's something more important than knowing whether an athlete can hit the curveball or sink the long jumper.The real issue is ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |