{"id":360796,"date":"2017-07-11T03:57:30","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T19:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/star-quality-decides-court-allocation-say-wimbledon-officials\/"},"modified":"2017-07-11T03:57:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T19:57:30","slug":"star-quality-decides-court-allocation-say-wimbledon-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/star-quality-decides-court-allocation-say-wimbledon-officials\/","title":{"rendered":"Star quality decides court allocation, say Wimbledon officials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.eurosport.com\/2017\/07\/10\/2125007-44457559-640-360.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\"><a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/venus-williams_prs551\/person.shtml\">Venus Williams<\/a> and home favourite Johanna Konta were the only two leading women to have their matches on Centre Court or Court One on &#8220;Manic Monday&#8221;, when all 16 fourth-round matches are played. <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/andy-murray_prs32219\/person.shtml\">Andy Murray<\/a>, <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/roger-federer_prs563\/person.shtml\">Roger Federer<\/a>, Rafa <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/rafael-nadal_prs25495\/person.shtml\">Nadal<\/a> and <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/novak-djokovic_prs30062\/person.shtml\">Novak Djokovic<\/a> all got top billing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">Some of the women players &#8220;demoted&#8221; to the lesser courts were less than impressed about their treatment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;I was really surprised that I was playing on Court Two,&#8221; said world number one and top seed <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/angelique-kerber_prs107870\/person.shtml\">Angelique Kerber<\/a> after she lost to Spanish 14th seed Garbine <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/garbine-muguruza_prs299308\/person.shtml\">Muguruza<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;I think it was a good match on a high level, I was actually looking forward to playing on one of the two big courts. Maybe I will talk to them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">Newly-crowned French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko said: &#8220;I think I deserve to play on a better court than Court 12.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;(Opponent) Elina (<a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/elina-svitolina_prs299294\/person.shtml\">Svitolina<\/a>) is number four in the world. I think our match was a very interesting one for the people to watch.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">After winning her match on Court Three, twice grand slam champion <a class=\"autolink\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eurosport.com\/tennis\/svetlana-kuznetsova_prs16551\/person.shtml\">Svetlana Kuznetsova<\/a> added: &#8220;I have not played on Court One or Centre Court the whole tournament, though I understand why Johanna Konta is there, it&#8217;s England and they have to put their product there.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">Former champion Chris Evert also weighed in.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;It\u2019s equal prize money so why not equal representation on Centre Court and Court number One?,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;I would like to see it three and three, and I think any woman would like to see it that way.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>FANTASTIC ERA<\/h2>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">Asked about the scheduling, Wimbledon chief executive Richard Lewis said: &#8220;You&#8217;ve got this fantastic era for men&#8217;s tennis. There have been years where the women have outshone the men but at the moment it&#8217;s very hard to argue beyond the big four &#8211; Djokovic, Murray, Nadal and Federer &#8211; being on Centre Court and Court One. &#8220;I absolutely respect Angelique Kerber is number one in the world, Muguruza is a former finalist, grand slam winner but we are spoilt for choice. There are matches on two and three today that would grace Centre Court on any other day.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s favouritism. I&#8217;d just say it&#8217;s taking the marquee matches. In the end it&#8217;s not about male\/female, it&#8217;s about which matches you think are the ones the public and the broadcasters would like to see. It&#8217;s about who are the star players at the time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">Not all women players were upset by the scheduling either and Magdalena Rybarikova risked a frosty locker-room reception.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;To be honest, I enjoy watching more men&#8217;s tennis,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;I think also for the spectators it&#8217;s more enjoyable to watch &#8211; because it&#8217;s huge names like Federer and Murray and I think they deserve to be on Centre Court,&#8221; the Slovakian said after winning her fourth-round match on Court 18.<\/p>\n<p class=\"storyfull__paragraph\">&#8220;Sometimes girls win 6-1 6-2 and I don&#8217;t know if it is for spectators, but sometimes it&#8217;s boring.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Venus Williams and home favourite Johanna Konta were the only two leading women to have their matches on Centre Court or Court One on &#8220;Manic Monday&#8221;, when all 16 fourth-round matches are played. Andy Murray, Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic all got top billing. Some of the women players &#8220;demoted&#8221; to the lesser [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":360797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[71,59,70],"class_list":["post-360796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-eurosport","tag-media","tag-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}