ATP World Tour Finals success proves Phil Anderton is still on the ball

Published on Friday 27 November 2009 22:51

ANYONE who presumed the British public had no interest in tennis outside Wimbledon fortnight has been made to think again this week. London's 17,500-capacity O2 Arena has been filled twice a day for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, which is in the UK for the first time following its move from Shanghai.

The success of the event has not only been a triumph for tournament director Phil Anderton, it has also provided a telling contrast with the two Edinburgh-based organisations for which he once worked, the Scottish Rugby Union and Hearts. Scotland's successes at Murrayfield over the last two weeks have been watched by attendances which contrasted unfavourably with Anderton's time as first the SRU's head of marketing and then its chief executive, while the success Hearts had when he was CEO there is now a distant memory.

Anderton resigned from the SRU in January 2005 after chairman David Mackay was forced to quit, and he was dismissed by Hearts later that year as Vladimir Romanov tightened his control of the club. In the spring of 2006 he joined the ATP, the governing body of men's tennis, and he has never looked back since.

Anderton has a dual role this week, being chairman of this tournament as well as carrying on his day job as ATP chief marketing officer. Planning the finals' London debut has taken up an increasing amount of his time over the past couple of years, and he has been understandably delighted, if also a little relieved, by how well things have gone.

"We didn't want a slow build to the event," he reflected, "It was very important to us that from Year One we had as good as we could get, though frankly we didn't think it would be a sell-out. Overall, I'm very happy with the way things have gone. The total capacity for the whole event is 263,000, and we're tantalisingly short of a complete sell-out – I haven't got the final figures yet for the last couple of days, but last time I checked we had just 3,000 tickets left unsold in total. So we're really pleased with that. It's one of those things that when sales go so well people ask how difficult it could be to sell an event with the top eight players in the world. But it's not Wimbledon, it's not the middle of summer, and it's a tournament with a format which is unfamiliar to a lot of people.

"Etienne de Villiers, the former chairman, fought very hard to bring it to London. Hosting the event in Shanghai helped the development of tennis in a very big market, but it's not the best place for your end-of-year championship. You want it to be packed out and you want TV to be able to show it in the big markets in Europe and North America."

The biggest criticism of the event, at least by those who have been here in person, has concerned the timing. The singles match each night has come on court at 8.45pm at the earliest – later if the preceding doubles over-run – meaning that some three-setters have been going on towards midnight, not long before the last tube leaves for central London. Such a finish is far later than many British sports fans are used to, and Anderton accepts the scheduling is something that needs to be examined carefully for next year.

"There is the rare situation, such as the match between Novak Djokovic and Nikolay Davydenko the other day, where people are leaving to get the tube. That's not good and obviously you want to avoid that. It's the classic thing where you've got a whole bunch of people who want the start time to be different. You've got to try and please most of them.

"You've got TV stations who all have different times. You've got hospitality, who want to invite guests for a meal before the tennis starts. And if you bring the evening start too far forward that would mean an earlier afternoon start, or rather a morning start probably, because you need a certain time to clear the stadium between sessions. But that would be one area we'll probably try to change, maybe by half an hour. That would take the strain off at the other end of the evening if there was a long match.

"But it is Year One, and there are always going to be a few things you decide you should maybe do a bit differently. It's our first time in this arena with a pretty big-scale event and there are some little things we'll probably change that the fans have not even noticed. The front row of the players' box, for example, is so low down that if the guests in there were small, if they were Kylie Minogue, they would struggle to see over the top of the perimeter advertising."

As at most tennis events, there has been a considerable gap here between the players arriving on court and the actual start of the contest. If that gap can be shrunk, the organisers would be some way towards ensuring a more suitable finishing time to the evening, but there are obstacles to doing so.

"Something we have discussed before, but we've hit the brick wall of tradition, is the warm-up," Anderton explained. "The whole warm-up takes an eternity. I always joke that Tiger Woods, when he stands on the first tee at the Open, doesn't get to hit 50 balls down the fairway before he goes off. We've got a warm-up area.

"At the moment the warm-up on court feels like it takes about half an hour. I just feel it would be a better spectacle for people if the players come on and we're straight into the action. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one happening, but it is the sort of thing I would look to change."

So, too, is the method used to determine group placings at the end of the round-robin stage. Deciding who goes through to the semi-finals by percentage of sets or games won, as was the case in Group A because Roger Federer, Juan Martin del Potro and Andy Murray all had two wins each, has not been ideal.

"It's certainly something we'll have a look at. You do want to have it kind of obvious who gets through, and you don't want to be in the position where people scratch their heads and ask what percentage of sets or games players have."

These are real difficulties which need to be ironed out, but compared to the difficulties which exist at Tynecastle and Murrayfield they are negligible. Anderton's move from the Scottish capital to London has been an unqualified success, and world tennis's gain has clearly been Scottish sport's loss.

O2 EVENT IS A HIT WITH UK CROWDS

THE cumulative attendance at the week-long ATP World Tour finals is expected to be in excess of quarter of a million people by the time the event comes to a conclusion at the O2 Arena in London today.

That figure compares favourably with other more established major sporting events staged in Britain this year.

The following list is by no means exhaustive, but it demonstrates how this week's tournament has caught the imagination of the public in its first year at its new location.

SIX NATIONS: 592,013*

WIMBLEDON: 511,043

BRITISH GRAND PRIX: 310,000

ROYAL ASCOT: 278,000

ATP WORLD FINALS: 260,000

BADMINTON TRIALS: 250,000

THE OPEN: 120,000

* Excluding matches played in France, Ireland and Italy, which would have taken the total for the championship to just under one million – 998,663.