One hopes Roddick doesn’t go the Rafter way

A wager was struck between two writers on Tuesday, in which the one who has travelled the circuit for 40 years invested in his belief that, at the present degenerative rate, Rafael Nadal and Andy Roddick will not be competing at the top of the game in five years. If his forecast bears fruit, then the sport will have torn itself apart from inside.

The apparently effortless brilliance of Roger Federer aside, who at the top of tennis in its present form of violence ? to use Andre Agassi’s description ? more vividly represents the dynamism and electricity that the sport is so desperate to sell to the world’s youth than these titans of Spain and the US?

And yet the sport is happy to flog them on a diet of disparate objectives, self-interest and a schedule that has borne no relation to common sense for years.

For the third event in succession for which he was scheduled, Nadal, 19, has had to bail out ? he travelled to one to say sorry, would have done so at the second had they not turned him down and was here, at the third, ready to play before further injuries surfaced.

Everyone accepts that the four Grand Slam tournaments are the cr?me de la cr?me, the prizes coveted above all else.

The Davis Cup and Fed Cup, bedrocks of the International Tennis Federation and its remit of spreading tennis the length and breadth of the globe, are, though, in need of a remodelling that more accurately reflects their unique stature.

Who in their right mind should put up with a schedule that starts the year with a Grand Slam in Australia, sends players scuttling to either Europe or the US, has three Masters Series men’s tournaments within five weeks on clay with the French Open in close pursuit, before giving everyone only two weeks on grass before Wimbledon, the prince of championships?

Then it is five weeks on bone-jarring American hard courts in unbearable humidity before the US Open rears its head with its malfunctioning, TV-dominated scheduling.

It is only four years ago that Pat Rafter of Australia, whose game was based on flowing athleticism, gave up the unequal struggle at the age of 28 and settled for more golf and time with his young family.

We can but hope that such a situation is distant for Nadal and Roddick, though I recall walking through Heathrow customs on the way home from the Great Britain Davis Cup tie in Switzerland in September, straight into Roddick, who was stopping over having played for more than four hours in a final rubber against Olivier Rochus of Belgium, a match that drew hardly a note anywhere else in the world.

He said he had never felt so mentally and physically exhausted and who really cared?

We are attending a Masters Cup with very few masters and what more alarming wake-up call does tennis want than that?

Yuvraj’s 100s

Wednesday’s 103 was Yuvraj Singh’s fifth one-day hundred. The following is the full list:
•102 n.o. vs Bangladesh 2002-03 in Dhaka
• 139 vs Australia 2003-04 in Sydney
• 110 vs West Indies in Colombo 2005-06
• 120 vs Zimbabwe in Harare 2005-06
• 103 vs South Africa in Hyderabad 2005-06