Revolution is a pretty big word to use for what is essentially tennis, but with less tennis.
I’ll admit, I was excited for the launch of Fast4. I swooned as the sultry baritone of ‘Channel 9 Voice Over Guy’ seductively informed me I’d be enjoying “one night with Roger Federer and Lleyton Hewitt” – it was going to be wild, it was going to be hot, nothing was ever going to be the same.
But, like most of my romantic encounters, it was weird and disappointing – there were long, awkward silences, it finished before anything exciting really started and Ken Sutcliffe was there.
The Concept
It’s not as though there was anything fundamentally disastrous with the Fast4 concept, but there wasn’t particularly anything exciting about it either.
There were no radical changes to the rules, no fanfare, no theatrics – just an exhibition match with a bigger marketing budget.
Twenty20 cricket succeeded because it took a risk and transformed the way cricket was played, Fast4 as it stands offers no such change.
The script was the same I’d seen a thousand times before: Federer effortlessly carving out baseline winners, customary Hewitt fight-back featuring gritty hustle and inch-perfect lobs, Federer decides enough is enough – kicks things up a notch. Federer wins, panders to local crowd and tells post-match interviewer how it’s always tough facing Lleyton.
If it’s going to be the revolution it aims to be, Fast4 needs to distinguish itself from regular tennis. It needs to be more exciting, more fun and more accessible.
Sure, the purists will stick their noses up at it, but you don’t institute a revolutionary concept to appease purists.
Incentivize trick shots, double-points for non-preferred hand, karaoke-super-power-play round where both players must sing Darryl Braithwaite’s The Horses for the duration of each point.
Fine. Look, I never said I had all the answers, but the brains-trust at Tennis Australia needs to find ways to change the way tennis is played – more highlights, more innovation, more water-cooler moments.
However cringe-inducing you might find the Big Bash aesthetic, it’s undeniably fun and it’s a huge part of the reason its pulling impressive crowd numbers this year.
I wasn’t at the Entertainment Centre last night but from home it didn’t seem like a particularly compelling experience – no big-room bangers in between points, no mic’d up players, no prizes for crowd members catching stray balls and perhaps most disappointingly of all – no fireworks exploding perilously close to players’ faces.
It’s not a horrible concept by any stretch of the imagination and I’d watch it again if it was on – but it’s not really a fresh concept either, a half-baked idea stuck in no man’s land between a gimmick and a serious competition.
The Coverage
To be fair, Tennis Australia wasn’t helped by the godlessly awful Channel 9 coverage that viewers had to suffer through.
First off, the Channel 9 producer seemed to have a curious and infuriating penchant for showing entire points with the camera only showing Hewitt on screen. Because as you know, tennis is a sport where one player, unopposed, hits a ball over a net into an empty court.
Then there was the commentary.
Or, more accurately, then there wasn’t the commentary.
For long periods (no, really, like for two or three minutes) there would just be no commentary at all – just an eerie, baffling silence.
The cruel irony of all this being, when Tubby and co are regurgitating their ceaseless, inane drivel during the cricket, the Channel 9 broadcast is crystal clear.
And finally, when the commentary returned, Darren Cahill and some Jim Courier impersonator battled through with the sort of stilted, flaccid banter usually reserved for Year 10 formals.
Oh also, the score was routinely one or two points behind and the on-screen graphics would intermittently vanish from view at random intervals.
If the coverage had been reasonable, last night would have been a mildly enjoyable, albeit unremarkable night of tennis viewing – instead, it was almost unwatchable.
Fast4’s been a proven grassroots concept for a number of years now and has enormous potential to boost social participation – but if it’s going to be a successful event on the professional level, big changes will need to be made both by the organisers and the broadcasters.
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