When Maria Sharapova won the ladies’ singles title at Wimbledon last summer she reacted like any other teenager and whipped out her mobile phone.
It was a symbolic moment that instantly made this newly crowned tennis goddess a flag bearer for her generation. For on every city street, in every shopping mall, you’ll find kids not so much on the move but on the phone. A generation that runs the risk of losing the use of previously important limbs because of the warmth of its embrace of couch culture, is developing strong and sensitive forefingers and a baffling ability to abbreviate. It is a generation that understands that while talk is cheap, text (sorry, txt) is cheaper.
So what was Maria doing when she reached for her cell phone? Calling Mum of course. Good girl!
However we learned next day that she had not been able to get a signal on Centre Court and that Mum had to wait for the news. Perhaps she could have tried a text which would have arrived at some point.
Mum, Have 1. Wots 4 T. Luv M. (little smiley face)
I have no idea what brand of cell phone Sharapova was using that day (she has since signed a deal with motorola) but can’t help wondering whether executives of Sony Ericsson had that moment in mind when they put pen to paper on an $88million sponsorship of women’s tennis this week.
The deal with the WTA Tour is the biggest in women’s sports history and appears to underscore the step change in the perception of professional women’s tennis under the guidance of chief executive Larry Scott.
Since taking over at the WTA Tour, Scott and his team have pulled in a raft of sponsorship deals on the back of a re-branding of the Tour which has benefited from one of the most creative and edgy marketing campaigns - in sport at least - of recent years. For the first time for a number of years, the sport is not only super competitive but benefits from a collection of players whose skills and personalities transcend the tennis court.
Women’s tennis is, suddenly, about more than tennis. It is about lifestyle and supreme female athleticism and, guess what, they are not mutually exclusive.
With athletes like Sharapova blazing the trail, Sony Ericsson, with its lifestyle products, appears to have made a smart choice. However, the company’s enthusiasm for technology might land it in hot water in some of tennis’ more traditional bastions.
In an interview this week, a senior executive said he hoped fans would embrace the technology and use SMS and video services during the 90-second breaks between sets. This would, he opined, help them get more from the tennis experience.
So it’s probably a good thing that Wimbledon is a slam rather than a WTA Tour event. As we have come to understand, the very act of turning on a mobile phone within the precincts of a Wimbledon show court is an offence ranking only slightly further down the criminal food chain than treason or arson in Her Majesty’s dockyards, both of which are still capital offences.
Rather then enhance the tennis experience, turning on your phone at Wimbledon is likely to end it while heightening the experience of suburban SW15 as you are ejected from the All England Club.
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Are we about to see another shift in the balance of power in European soccer? TWI certainly thinks so.
The company, which is marketing partner to the French league, points out that the pre-Christmas domestic TV rights deal with Canal+ is, at Euros 600 million per season, the biggest league deal anywhere in the world and that the influx of money to the domestic game will be used to help clubs develop their stadia and training facilities. It will, inevitably, also allow the clubs to pay higher wages which will serve not only to attract leading overseas players to the French league but, perhaps more important, stem the drain of talent which has seen most of the best French players head overseas, generally to North or West London.
Stadium attendance, which has traditionally been patchy at best, is growing and two French clubs, Lyons and Monaco, reached European finals last year.
In addition, TWI says it has more than doubled the number of overseas territories taking TV coverage of Ligue 1 since it was awarded the contract last year.
All this paints a fairly positive picture. After all, the success of the French national team in recent times has been achieved despite rather than because of the domestic league set up. If what has been a constraining influence becomes a positive force, who knows where Ligue 1 will rank in five years time?
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Does Sepp Blatter have supernatural powers? On Monday the FIFA president announced that he is in favour of technology that would assist soccer referees to make more accurate decisions. In fact, he told reporters, a new electronic system that would determine whether the ball had crossed the goal line would be tested at the Carling Cup Final in Wales in March.
Spookily, less than 24 hours later in a Premier League match at Old Trafford, Manchester United goalkeeper Roy Carroll managed to scoop away a ball which was so far over his line it should have had a passport.
This produced a number of responses.
First, the UK opticians Specsavers pulled the tackiest PR stunt of recent times by offering all English league referees a free eye test. It was kind of funny when the company signed its continuing sponsorship of referees in Scotland but it’s really a one-joke show and the timing here simply stank.
More important, it reopened the debate on the role of technology in relation to referees. While the Cyclops-style line-minder technology that will be tried in Cardiff is more or less a no-brainer (so long as it passes rigorous tests) its introduction may at least open the door to consideration of other, more advanced and complicated technology.
Those who have visited trade fairs such as Sportel in the last 10 years will be aware of the development of broadcast-focused technology which allows pictures from a variety of TV cameras to be converted into digital images, which can be viewed in infinite detail and from any conceivable angle. It is a technology already used by some television stations to enhance their analysis of soccer. It could clearly be used to judge issues like handball and offside…in theory.
The key issue here is not, we understand, the accuracy of the output as much as the time it takes to process the incoming data from cameras and produce the output on which decisions might be made. The gap is currently far, far too great and would result in unfeasibly lengthy delays to the game. Consequently its implementation is presently an absolute no-no.
However, if technology generally continues to develop at its current pace, where processing power increases and processing time is reduced, it could well be that referees will have a reliable and all-seeing third-eye in the stadium, for top matches at least, by the end of the next decade.
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It was heartening to learn that F1 champion Michael Schumacher is to donate $10million to the tsunami relief effort. It’s a huge sum of money that speaks volumes for the man’s compassion.
Equally, the pledges of sports organisation including FIFA, the Asian Football Confederation and the IOC are to be welcomed, as is L’Equipe’s suggestion that these groups stage a summit to devise the most effective strategy for delivering sports’ assistance.
While accepting that, in such tragic circumstances, any aid is good aid, it was slightly disturbing to see two of the candidate cities for the 2012 Olympic Games publicly making donations.
This tactic also sticks in the throat because of its potential for escalation. The destiny of the Olympics must be decided on the merit of bids rather than a candidate city’s propensity for donating money to a cause, however deserving.
The whole thing smacks of the worst sort of gross opportunism.
If a candidate city or its supporters wanted to make a donation they could have done so through any one of the established charities and relief organisation at work in the area or collecting domestically.
At the very least, those which have done so should at have resisted the temptation to issue a press release to tell the world and, in passing of course, the IOC about their generosity.
