If it moves in British tennis these days, the LTA would like someone to sponsor it. Roger Draper, the chief executive, discovered recently that Spain has a deal with a commercial partner that pays for all of its tennis balls, whereas the blazers here have been paying for their own for years.

Draper said yesterday that the sport here is “quite a unique proposition”. He has got that one right. No one else in the world has considered paying the enormous sums he guaranteed to Brad Gilbert to coach Andy Murray, but when asked yesterday whether the reported £500,000 a year represented value for money, the chief executive hedged.

“We always said we are in this for the long term,” he said. “I would love to get instant results, but ultimately we are trying to create a new professional system and where we are on our journey we are joining things up even more,” he said. You tell me if that was a yes or a no.

Draper did reveal that, by September, he hoped to have a strategy in place to reward those British coaches who have been doing their bit to buck the trend of too little competition producing too few players who have any idea of what it takes to compete. “We’re overhauling the system and we’ll bring in an incentive scheme at both the high and the low level, for those who encourage more kids to take up mini tennis, who get their players into the national tournaments and who win the titles,” he said. “We are looking for the Brad Gilberts of mini tennis.” On comparatively mini contracts, one hopes.

The development budget has been increased from £1 million to £4 million, which is excellent news until you hear that the tournament department has been told to trim £2 million from its allowance to help to pay the bills for the foreign coaches. It is a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The coach of the moment is Justin Sherring, the director of tennis at the Weybridge Academy in Surrey, where Chris Eaton first hit a ball at the age of 8. Sherring was leaping around No 3 Court on Tuesday evening when Eaton clinched his remarkable victory against Boris Pashanski, of Serbia, for he is an impassioned man who did not want to camouflage his feelings. He worries that too much kowtowing has become an inherent weakness of the British coach.

“I feel we have lost a lot of our identity,” Sherring said. “We have to be ourselves, to put the passion back into British tennis. Too much of the sport here is dominated by test-tube tennis, as if it can be manufactured. I’m hoping there are a lot of coaches out there who say, ‘I knew that Chris Eaton when he wasn’t very good and look at him now. Maybe I can do it with my players.’ Coaches in Britain need to be able to see that next rung on the ladder and be able to reach it.”

The leader of the test-tube brigade is Steve Martens, the new player director at the LTA, who was brought in from Belgium to overhaul technical development and who, when speaking at a convention for 150 coaches last weekend, said that the success of the Serbs and Belgians in recent years had been down to “damn luck”.

Draper said: “You always need a little bit of luck and you need a system in place and to keep that system for a number of years. Belgium stuck with the same formula for 15 years, and it was a hard grind to get where they have.”

This is the same Belgium whose production line is grinding hard to little effect, with one boy and two girls in the world’s top 100 on the ITF junior circuit, while Britain has nine boys and two girls — figures lauded by the LTA as evidence of the country’s success. Spain, by the way, does not only have its balls paid for by someone else, but pays precious little attention to junior rankings. It is in the senior world where it makes its mark, as 11 players in the top 100 on the ATP Tour and four women similarly placed on the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour testify.

Draper would know all this because he has a computer that, when he opens it each morning at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, southwest London, shows him tennis trends across the world. One thing he has noticed is that Russian male players are threatening to become as dominant as the country’s women are. “In the next ten years, the Russian men are the ones to watch, but we are in the mix as well,” he said.

Marat Safin, a player who was definitely not produced in a test tube, offered some vintage tennis from the old Russia on Centre Court yesterday with his straight-sets victory over Novak Djokovic, the third seed, who was being talked of in credible quarters as a possible champion here.

Safin, in this mood, is really something to admire. He has spent the past three weeks working his socks off in an effort to get himself in the best physical and mental shape for a tournament to which he has committed only half-heartedly for far too long.

“Who is the master?” Gerard Tsobanian, his joyous manager, asked and, in doing so, answered his own inquiry.