Why all the secrecy? Tennis badly needs more injury transparency...

This is a part of a great report into injuries written by Andrew Lawrence @ Sports Illustrated.

Typically when an athlete gets injured, a familiar routine unfolds: the injury is named, the severity articulated and the prescription detailed.

Such routines keep people from drawing their own wild conclusions. The exception, of course, is tennis, where players fall ill and drop out of sight without immediate explanation -- and that leads to long, meandering games of telephone.

The game got especially intense on Wednesday afternoon, when 10th-seeded Victoria Azarenka of Belarus collapsed on the court 30 minutes into her second-round match with Argentina's Gisela Dulko at the Grandstand. Playing in triple-digit temperatures, she was helped into a wheelchair, carted off the court and vanished without a trace into a whirlwind of intrigue. Was it heat stroke? Was she hospitalized? Was she conscious?

The answers were vague and streamed in slowly. In a statement, tournament referee Brian Earley said Azarenka had "headache-like symptoms" and was taken to a nearby hospital for "diagnostic testing" (what is she, a Chevy Malibu?) before adding that "out of respect to her privacy, we can not give any more details."

Much later, Azarenka issued her own statement that filled in some blanks: She fell on her arms and head in a warm-up run before her match. She was examined by a medical team and cleared to play, but struggled to compete through a headache and dizziness. Laboring to stay upright and see, she tumbled onto the court. At the hospital, she was diagnosed with a mild concussion.

It's the kind of explanation that is de rigueur in other sports and disseminated with lightning speed. When Giants quarterback Eli Manning suffered his gory head injury during the team's preseason opener against the Jets last month, the injury's particulars -- including how it was treated -- were widely known within minutes. When center Andrew Bynum went under the knife last season, insight abounded about the procedure and his projected timetable for return.

But in tennis, sagas like Azarenka's play out like serial dramas. If the sport were serious about accelerating the flow of information and sharpening accuracy, it would adopt a system more like the NFL's or the NBA's and provide year-round health updates on all of its players. But that would require a cooperative spirit, and tennis -- a skein of disparate interests -- is hardly a tightly wound operation.

Also, there's a belief that a tennis injury wire would encourage gambling, an issue that had become particularly acute in recent years. But tennis is no more at risk than any other sport. If anything, it would level the playing field between the bettors who scout tournaments to harvest first-hand injury information and those who don't.

And then there's the competitive advantage on the court. Disclosing injuries has long been a sign of weakness in sports, and tennis is no different. But there's a difference between keeping bumps and bruises secret and playing with a major illness -- like mononucleosis. That's something Roger Federer did for most of 2008 and Andy Roddick did for some of this year.

Neither player revealed he had the illness until it could help justify poor on-court results. Though Roddick declined to use mono as an excuse for his second-round loss to Serbia's Janko Tipsarevic on Wednesday night, Roddick's resignation in defeat suggests a realization that he wasn't at full strength. "I'm gonna get some rest tomorrow," he said afterward.

Overall...

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/andrew_lawrence/09/03/tennis.injuries/index.html#ixzz0yRi3J9wu

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It started yesterday with a few losses and I thought it was going to result in another loss but it turned it around and finished with a few wins to make a slight profit for the day.

There wasn't many selections for the second day running, just 12 yesterday and I hope it picks up as it usually does better when there are more selections. I can't remember if it generally has less picks during Grand Slams as I missed most of Wimbledon when I re-started and I think I was doing the football scalping during FO so not really concentrating on the results of this as much.

I suppose we will see in the coming days if the amount of selections picks up or not.



EDIT: Update and this could be a very good or a very bad day. I have been placing some of the bets and it could be a big chunk of the bank gone should there be a few losers but if they all win then a big boost after a few losing days. Keep your fingers crossed for me!