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Pat Cash

How fitting that Cash recently became tennis’s youngest grandfather. The whiny tone to his tennis punditry, the classical ocker sexism and the sub-Blairite attempts to cling to his youth by playing electric guitar suggest a man at least three decades older than his forty-five years.

Plagued by the confusions that causing mild offence is a substitute for wit and grinning cockiness is indiscernible from winsome charm, Cash’s specialist impertinence is ignorantly dismissing tennis players of infinitely greater talent and spirit than he ever showed. Allied to this is a rare talent for being wrong. To take one memorable example, early in 2007 Cash wrote a piece, headlined ‘Serena is Lost Cause’, in The Times, attempting to nudge the younger Williams sister towards retirement and describing her as ‘deluded’ for imagining she had a future at the top of the game. ‘When Serena Williams arrives in Australia on her first foreign playing trip in a year,’ began the world-weary elder statesman, ‘and announces that it is only a matter of time before she is again dominating the sport, it’s time to tell her to get real.’ Two weeks later, as you will already perhaps have guessed, Serena annihilated Maria Sharapova 6–1 6–2 in the Australian Open final

Getting real seems a habitual problem for Cash. His own journey into retirement was not the gracious swansong he advocated for Serena. Far from it, the embittered grouch on annual display in the BBC’s wretched Wimbledon coverage had an early run-out. He took deep umbrage at the failure of tournament directors and the ATP to give him wild cards late in his career, when the rigor mortis had set into his game. The therapy that followed did little to improve him.

There have been sporting pundits who endeared themselves by forever complaining that things ain’t what they were (Freddie Trueman comes to mind) and scratching their heads until the scalp bled in mystification at modern ways. Cash is not among them. While he may choose to regard his vinegary carping about the venality and amorality of current tennis as the refreshing bluntness of a straight-shooter, it is in fact purely the self-pitying rancour of the nasty old geezer in the nursing home wash-clean plastic chair, muttering ‘Dunno they’re born’ at anyone under sixty who appears on the telly. ‘Nobody wanted anything to do with me,’ he sniffled once of the indifference shown to him in the dog days of his playing career. You know just how they felt.