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Plans to reintroduce a girls’s match at The Queen’s Membership relaxation on convincing the ATP Tour the grass courts will stay in adequate situation for the lads’s occasion the next week.
The LTA and the All England Membership wish to stage a WTA match at Queen’s within the first week of the grass court docket season from 2025.
If the ATP might be persuaded then the highest girls’s gamers can be gracing the courts of the west London membership for the primary time since 1973.
“We have got high confidence, and we have got significant evidence from the All England Club as to how grass courts wear over a two-week period,” the LTA chief govt Scott Lloyd mentioned.
“The grass courts at Queen’s are perfectly capable of delivering two weeks of professional level tennis. We’ve got the data.
“We predict it could be nice for that swing of tournaments and for the ladies’s occasions, significantly from a visibility and profile perspective.”
The LTA says it has studied weather conditions, the density of the soil and potential wear to areas of the court, such as the baseline.
But male players are understood to be unhappy about the prospect of starting their week on used courts.
“The ATP are vital companions of ours and we’re working with them to strive to make sure that the gamers are blissful and comfy that the floor can maintain use,” he continued.
“Usually gamers are fairly delighted to make it to the second week of Wimbledon and you do not hear them argue an excessive amount of in regards to the court docket floor in that situation. We’re very hopeful that there will not be any points, however we’re working by way of the logistics.”
Logistics include the availability of courts for men who arrive early to practise and the impact on the ATP qualifying event which is held the weekend beforehand.
The ATP has been open to the idea of more combined events in recent years but will have to balance that with the wishes of its members. Whether it has the legal cover to block the LTA’s plans remains to be seen.
A women’s event at Queen’s would replace Eastbourne as the sole WTA 500 event staged in the UK in the run-up to Wimbledon.
Eastbourne would still host a combined event but, once the WTA event is downgraded to 250 status, there will be greater restrictions on who can enter.
As a WTA 500 event is staged in Germany in the same week, no top-10 player would be allowed to enter Eastbourne – unless they are British, or the defending champion.
No more than three top-30 players would be permitted in total, and this at an event which in 2023 played host to half of the world’s top 10.
“Eastbourne sells out and we have loved it over a really, very lengthy time frame as a serious match venue, however the actuality of that location is that it’s commercially restricted to some extent,” mentioned Lloyd.
“We simply suppose that having a WTA 500 in week one, straight after Roland Garros, will elevate the profile of top-level tennis in that interval.
“It’s not about looking to concentrate our tournaments in London. We will still absolutely support our other venues throughout that calendar, and indeed as you see us doing with Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup – whether that’s Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry. We want to have that geographical diversity.”
There isn’t a scope for an additional WTA grass-court occasion within the UK, and, because the LTA now owns the Nottingham Tennis Centre, it’s the match in Birmingham which is more likely to make approach for Queen’s.
The Edgbaston Priory Membership first staged a WTA occasion in 1982, when Billie Jean King received the title.
These discussions are going down as the game investigates the viability of a ‘Premium Tour’, which may create a collection of extra unique tournaments. However as that may be a good distance from turning into actuality, different concepts proceed to be superior.
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