Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round match’. No, we didn’t take to Lendl because he didn’t smile much and was as undemonstrative as you could get, the perfect bad guy to put in front of lovable showmen like Boris Becker, Pat Cash and Henri Leconte. Lendl was the last chip off the old Communist Bloc. If Rocky IV had been made about tennis, Dolph Lundgren would have played the baddie and he would have been called something like, er, Ivan Lendl.
What we do love in Britain is a coach, preferably a winning coach, no matter where they are from: Sven, Fabio, Duncan Fletcher, Andy Flower, Sir Clive, Sir Alex, The Special One, Jurgen Grobler.
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