Published: 18 June, 2015
by RICHARD OSLEY

GIVEN most of our football-loving nation only really watches tennis for a month every year, it's amazing what know-it-alls about the sport everyone seems to be come summer.

In the run-up to Wimbledon and Wimbledon itself, everybody arrives as an expert, rushing down to the local courts, limbering up like they are ready to return a Serena serve and parroting on about inside-out backhands and slice volleys.

Yet despite this universal expertise, any players who do well at Wimbledon that are not in the foursome of Djokovic, Nadal, Federer or Murray are treated like some sort of mystical beasts who have risen from nowhere, even if they are actually a fairly high-achievers during the rest of the year and possibly nestled nicely in the world's top 20.

So, while many of us might be partial to a bit of tennis, hardly any of us really know where the sport is at.

It simply gets forgotten the rest of the year and when it returns at Wimbledon, it's rather like when you suddenly remember hummus exists: you eat it, recall it tastes nice, eat it for lunch everyday for two weeks, get sick of it and forget about it. A year later, you are walking down the fridge aisle, see a tub of hummus and history repeats.

The same thing happens with tennis, as people remember they love a sport which they haven't watched since… well, the last Wimbledon.

And this hummus-thin level of knowledge leads us to make erratic judgment calls about what's really going on. Only players we remember the names of from last year are any good, for example.

We also have this great expectation in British players which simply isn't justified.

Aside from Andy Murray, most of them find it tough, just as they do for the rest of the year. Being kiboshed at Wimbledon in the first round for some of them is probably the most predictable result, and yet we treat it as a devastating failure, dismissing them as typical Brit loser.

If we knew a little more, we'd see Britain is like most other countries who do not have a whole fleet of top 10 performers. That includes the United States right now, and that has a population of loads of people. Our ignorant expertise makes fools of us, but, you know, it's not our fault. The problem lies with the limited options to watch tennis on terrestial, free to air television. We only know what happens at Wimbledon because unless you've got some spare dosh, that's all you are allowed to watch. The only tennis on TV is the tennis on TV now. So we can't moan about the lack of fresh talent – we can’t dismiss them all as typical Brit losers – when exciting tournaments which might just inspire a new flock, which take place all year round are locked away on pay channels. Open it up. We need to see more than just Queen's Club and Wimbledon to us, and some ITV coverage of the French Open.