Beginning next year, the LTA will be offering British players an extra £1000 for coming through qualifying and reaching the main draw of a tour events. Even typing it out is surreal. Surely the prospect of reaching the main draw of a tour event is enough motivation and incentive to do so? Decisions like these just make the LTA appear so clueless and out of touch. It’s as if they have so much money rolling in from Wimbledon all year that they have no idea what to do with it.

The LTA seem to have their priorities completely wrong. Right now, they are pumping money towards the current players, in the lame hope that something will suddenly click and Britain will produce another Andy Murray. But these players just aren’t good enough. For all the criticism levelled on the British men and women, no matter how hard they try and regardless of how much money thrown at the likes of James Ward and Dan Cox, they are not going to suddenly morph into Tomas Berdych overnight and start making Grand Slam finals.

If the LTA are serious about developing British tennis, then they need to aim those monstrous wads of cash at the grassroots, and begin to nourish talent from a younger age. In Britain, tennis is competing against so many other sports. The best athletes are moving to football and rugby, and those with the most natural hand-eye coordination are taking up cricket and even golf instead. Until they begin to make tennis a more attractive sport for youngsters, and until they focus on attempting to rid tennis of the ‘country club’ stigma that still exists even today in 2010, Britain will continue to be the laughing stock of the tennis world.

The biggest problem is that, as underlined by this most recent blunder, the LTA are no closer to doing so than they were 5 or 10 years ago.