Roger

This is an interesting development for the badminton world in UK.

In some respects there's good news and bad news. The good news, hopefully, is that this brings good badminton to certain areas and may create an opportunity for players and young players to watch top class badminton.

The bad news is that this is going to cost money. So who's paying? Most likely sponsors but does this mean BE will be asking us for more money too? Also, is this bringing in another level of elitism? I'm not so sure.

There's already a bad attitude in some counties about representation e.g. “I'm not travelling that far to play 4th mixed.” So, with a fairly full calendar, how is this going to fit?

My guess is that with so few teams there is little impact on many of us unless we have a team in our locality.

Finally, there is going to be a need to pull huge crowds to these events. We can't even fill an arena for European Championships or early rounds of All Englands. How on earth are we to attract big crowds for these matches?

Paul

Dee

Time will tell whether this will be successful. I honestly wonder whether we have the quality of player and the personalities in the game to hold our attention.

I agree that more experimentation needs to be done with camera angles and especially using slow motion to show the public what happened. I'd love more analysis like the football pundits whereby they draw lines on screen to help us understand the game. This never happens in badminton and therefore we cannot learn the same.

Paul

Roger

Yes, we all want it to be a success. One of the other questions here is whether it will actually do anything for grass routes badminton? I may be opening Pandora's box here but as grass routes and club/league badminton, clubs want BE to do something for them to justify the fees. So BE offers to send a coach to the club and lo and behold, only a fraction of the players want coaching. The rest want the coach to wave a magic wand tell them they'll be better players in the morning and that's about it.

We, as a whole and not individuals here seem to be missing how success works. Goals – coaching – practice – more coaching – more practice = result.

So why are people trying to short cut this formula to coaching (or most likely, coach appears) – play games = get result.

BE doesn't really have the support of the people and in return I'm not expecting much support back. That coupled with the lack of truly international standard players turns people away. Case in point. The last two years Nationals. Players have been allowed to almost disregard an umpire so they can talk (again and again), towel down and of course – touch hands! What happened to play must be continuous?

OK, I'm rambling a little and going off subject, but all for a good reason. People want to be entertained. At the highest level, players are entertained to a point, like at All Englands. However, as we've seen there, poor scheduling and matches with no bite because they are prearranged are boring.

If this team event is to work, we have to sell the players so the people know who they are etc, to the extent we know the players' loves/hates, favourite charity etc – anything to make this person real, interesting, potentially exciting to watch. At the moment only a relative few know who current England players are. We stand a chance with the men but I'm not being sexist here, who on earth knows the English ladies except for Mrs Adcock? What have they won…anywhere except at home?

OK, my rant may move too far away from the point, but success breeds success. I remember when I was up and coming travelling to see England versus China or Korea matches. We had great players in those days (mid 1980's) with so many legends to look up to. We had crowds of players watching them because we could get so near courtside and we wanted to watch our England stars like Gillian Gilks, Gillian Clarke, Gillian Gowers, Nora Perry, Mike Tredgett, Martin Dew, Darren Hall etc. Goodness knows how much we need quality like that again.

Paul