Since Ashleigh Barty retired there has been a glaring hole in Australian tennis with the rest of the players failing to pick up the slack.
To be completely fair it's quite big shoes to fill as Barty was the undisputed best player in the world at the time she retired. Nobody seriously challenged her en route to the Australian Open trophy and since then other players have been failing to keep up.
Sam Stosur, an Australian tennis legend is playing her final season and he hoped to become a mentor for the next generation of players but she understands that there are problems:
“I think Ash covered up a few holes in where our players are. All of a sudden, things are not looking so great."
She further added:
“We need all of those to kind of push each other along and really try to get up the rankings. One in the top 100 is not great by any means but hopefully we can push the eight, 10 to 12 players in the next bracket. Hopefully it is not too long.”
Fellow Australian John Millman also touched upon the subject saying:
“I think it gets lost in Australia just how challenging tennis is. We are not in your faces every week like your footy players are. There are probably 400 footy players that are on a list. Then you have a sport played in 180 countries. And you start doing the maths and you think, ‘If you can get one player into the top 100, that is the equivalent of probably having the best player in the league in Australia,’. I am not having a go at footy. Everyone knows that I love my footy. But in terms of how we perceive tennis players, it blows my mind.”
He underlined that having six players from Australia ranked inside the top 100 is pretty good. It's hard to argue against that but a country used to tennis champions might disagree.
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