
Spectator Sport: Coach party
Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round match’. No, we didn’t take to Lendl because he didn’t smile much and was as undemonstrative as you could get, the perfect bad guy to put in front of lovable showmen like Boris Becker, Pat Cash and Henri Leconte. Lendl was the last chip off the old Communist Bloc. If Rocky IV had been made