SO IT’S time for British tennis to not only become ruthless but also get real by aspiring to emulate France as a nation that positively encourages youngsters to pick up tennis rackets and provides them the facilities and, more importantly, the competitive structure to mature into top-flight players.

It was the very sentiment that caused the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) to appoint Patrice Hagelauer as performance director eight years ago. Some may remember the much-vaunted initiative Club Vision and all its refreshing plans. Most might care to ask questions of what it actually achieved. Or more to the point, was it actually adhered to and given a chance?

The aim at the time was to produce sufficient players that might just give this country a bus-load of entrants en route to Grand Slam tournaments. But as Hagelauer repeatedly stated all those years ago: “Unless we can change Britain’s tennis clubs from leisure and adult-orientated organisations to a more competitive and junior culture, you can forget about producing champions.”

French players continue to do well: two of them, Nicolas Mahut and Arnaud Clement, faced each other in the semi-finals of the Artois Championships yesterday.

Some of the large-scale chains of commercially motivated clubs have accepted their responsibility and have part-financed plans to target and nurture potential. For instance the Esporta group, with more than 30 clubs around the country, have formed their own racket academy, negotiated a £1m, four-year deal with the LTA and aim to soon have 3,500 juniors at development level and 300 performance players from the age of 10 years and up.

Nevertheless, numbers still stack up horribly against the British. Compared with 80,000 youngsters competing regularly in France, latest figures show there are just 8,400 doing the same in this country, although there are more than 6,000 licensed coaches.

The current chief executive Roger Draper is a very different man to his predecessor John Crowther and has no issues with being both visible and accountable. Clearly he takes the view that the best form of defence is to attack and rest assured he will not take the Crowther route and retreat into an LTA bunker for the majority of the fortnight.

This week Draper announced the LTA’s new hard line with current players who, seeing the pristine new £40m National Training Centre at Roehampton, state-of-the-art back-up in terms of sports science and a gang of top-flight highly-paid coaches head-hunted from around the world, might just be coerced into believing such elitism will camouflage their own mediocrity. It is a timely wake-up call given the fact that Andy Murray’s involvement at Wimbledon remains in doubt because of his wrist injury, while after almost a decade and a half of noble service many people are willing to bet that Tim Henman’s 14th Wimbledon will be his last and he will soon follow Greg Rusedski into retirement.

However, it is necessary to look much further into the future than just the upcoming fortnight and question whether we truly have the structure to ever again be a tennis power.

Whether Britain will ever truly bury the Salad Days image of the traditional tennis club where the chairman’s wife merits prime court time with her fellow ladies that lunch for a little hit and giggle and junior players are regarded as tantamount to vermin is open to debate. But Draper insists his job is now to disrupt the status quo rather than maintain it.

Make no valid judgment over the next three weeks but feel free instead to take stock critically in three or four years.

Murray tennis academy

The mother of Britain’s top tennis player, Andy Murray, plans to launch a private academy for the country’s elite players. Judy Murray, inset, will join Leon Smith, her son’s former coach, to run the centre in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire. The new academy will work in tandem with 13 other high-performance centres in England run by the LTA.