W L
THE BALL WAS IN … LIVERPOOL . CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF THE LIVERPOOL INTERNATIONAL TENNIS TOURNAMENT
Liverpool has always been well known for its sporting prowess , but back in 2002 , tennis wasn ’ t hugely in the running .
Fast forward to 2022 and we ’ ve seen many international stars hit the courts at Calderstones Park , and now at Liverpool Cricket Club , with hundreds of children taking up the sport on the back of the annual event .
We caught up with the man behind it all , Tournament Director Anders Borg , who came up with the original idea for the Liverpool International Tennis Tournament and who is busy with final preparations for this year ’ s event next month .
How did it all begin ? I had this idea to bring tennis out of the sort of Southern snobbish environment . We wanted to bring tennis out to the people , and we were looking for public parks across England to hold a tournament in . I came to Liverpool , and saw Calderstones Park , I thought this would be the perfect venue to bring tennis to new places .
The first year we had the then world number one and former US Open champion , Marat Safin signed up and that created a lot of excitement over this new tournament coming to Liverpool . Local people gave us great support and flocked to Calderstones Park where Safin didn ’ t let them down and lifted the inaugural trophy .
What are some of the big memorable moments for you over the last 20 years ? I think the biggest one has got to be when John McEnroe visited us . He walked out onto the centre court in front of a capacity crowd wearing an Everton shirt . Half the crowd were cheering , and half of the crowd were booing !
He was fantastic , he was like a rock star , so I have great memories of that . There are lots of great moments . We ’ ve had some fantastic names over the years . Ivan Ljubicic , Martina Navratilova , Greg Rusedski , Martina Hingis , Virginia Wade , Caroline Wozniacki , Bjorn Borg , who was supposed to play but had injured himself the day before . We ’ ve been incredibly lucky to have had all these players involved .
You ’ ve had a lot of up-and-coming players as well haven ’ t you ? Yes , after the first year , we thought it would be good to focus on players that were working their way up to the number one ranking and in 2004 and 2005 we had Novak Djokovic as a 17-year-old .
Of course , he went on to become one of the greatest of all time , so that started us on that path . Another player was Emma Raducanu – who was actually born the year the Liverpool tournament started - she came to Liverpool in 2015 and won one of our junior events and has obviously gone on to great things .
We have an impressive track record of finding young and up and coming players who have later hit the big time . We had Caroline Wozniacki the Danish player who was 17 the first time she played in the competition and went on to be ranked number one in the world . It ’ s something that the tournament has become particularly famous for , and we ’ re very proud of . I think it ’ s lovely for people to see them in Liverpool and then later realise who they saw .
14 wirrallife . com