Players and punters can cash in by putting in the hard graft during the off-season

Wonderful World of Tennis / Scott Ferguson / 15 November 2007 / Leave a Comment

Scott's Spot - Scott tells us why doing your research and keeping up to date with players's progress in the off-season can prove to be very profitable

So the season of 2007 is all but over. Even the stars playing in the Shanghai finale look exhausted and everyone's looking forward to a few weeks of rest. Like all end of season breaks, some players take the word rest more literally than others.

We've all heard the stories of footballers who have taken a month off and have spent every night in pubs and clubs, returning home via the kebab shop or late night curry house. They come back to training a stone overweight and instead of strength and tactical training, their whole pre-season is wasted on shedding the flab rather than improving their game.

Tennis is no different. Players are becoming more professional by the year but there are still plenty of players who smoke like a chimney, party like playboys and over-indulge in the foods which give American kids the lardiest rear-ends in the western world. They're only human and like any other professional sport, many are reluctant to sacrifice their prime years of youth for devotion to the task.

Come January, a new season begins and players have to battle it out again to defend their points and retain their ranking. Play worse than last year and you get usurped by the younger, keener brigade. Improve on last year's results and you have less struggles through qualifying just to reach the main draw.

So how do we track who's busting a gut to improve their ranking and who has their feet up enjoying a nice cup of tea? By doing the hard yards yourself.

The internet is an amazing resource but most of us are very limited in what we use it for. The name sites such as ATPtennis, BBC and SportingLife are only going to tell you so much and that info will be common knowledge very quickly.

The off-season is all about exhibition events and pre-season training. Some players will cash in on their stardom and play 'exos' in cities which often don't have their own tour event. One or two matches for a big appearance fee is hard to knock back. But these events don't show up on their official records, so how do you find the results?

Search far and wide! Look at Google, RSS feeds, collective news sources such as newsnow.co.uk etc. To some, the victory of Ferrer over Nadal in the Spanish final of Betfair Turbo Tennis mighn't mean a lot, but one month later he has beaten him again in Shanghai - a solid formline. Don't restrict yourself just to English language sites either - translation sites such as babelfish.co.uk make it very easy to convert back to English quickly.

The other big source of off-season tidbits is player blogs and websites. Scan the official websites for links to player sites and use Google. Andy Murray's training programme will be publicised in the UK directly from his website, but how about the lower-profile players? Wouldn't it have been nice to know that Davydenko or Schuettler had spent a month in Thailand training very hard before their surge in the rankings a few years back?

Who do you think will be the hard workers over the winter break and come out flying in January? And who:s going to enjoy that break just a little too much?

To visit Andy Murray's website go to:

http://www.andymurray.com/