Suffering from Nadal/Djokovic/Murray/Federer withdrawal?

Written by: Tennischiro on 9th February 2012

Suffering from Nadal/Djokovic/Murray/Federer withdrawal?

Rafael Nadal of Spain celebrates a point against Novak Djokovic of Serbia during the men's final of the Australian Open Grand Slam tennis tournament in Melbourne, Sunday, January, 29, 2012. EPA/DAVID CROSLING |

Just a little reminder to all you tennis junkies out there. There is a bit of a let down for all of us after the Australian Open. Obviously, there had to be or we would all eventually collapse with cardiac arrest. Even tennis junkies need a break. But there is a lot still going on before the major events swing back into action next month at Indian Wells and Miami.

If you get the Tennis Channel, you probably are aware you can see the US-Switzerland Davis Cup matches live at 4:00 AM (Pacific) beginning Friday morning and tape delayed about 12 hours later. You also can see tape delayed coverage of the WTA Paris event quarterfinals. They’ll continue with coverage of those events through the weekend with the women’s semifinals Saturday afternoon and evening and the Davis Cup doubles Saturday morning and tape-delayed later on. Then come the finals on Sunday in Paris as well as the last two rubbers of the Davis Cup tie from Switzerland. (The Tennis Channel also offers some streaming coverage; for example, it is currently streaming the Dallas Challenger; and there is no charge for that!)

But if you don’t happen to get the Tennis Channel, tennis coverage on broadcast and cable tv is a little light. Actually, it’s dismal! So here are a couple of alternative sources of TV coverage online.

I’ve been trying to highlight the advantages of watching your own selection of matches on TennisTV (TennisTV.com) and they will be covering the Paris Open GDF-Suez WTA event beginning with tomorrow’s matches, starting about 3:30 in the morning, Pacific time. (Remember that on TennisTV, if you can sign on to the coverage of a court sometime during that day’s broadcast, you can go back and look at the earlier matches on that court. So you don’t have to get up at 3:30 to see your favorite player. But I’ve found I have to sign on to the court sometime during the live broadcast or it’s gone! I’m assuming this will still be the case.) You have to subscribe for TennisTV, but there are a lot of advantages: you pick the match you watch, no commercials (at least very few), good commentators). Next week they’ll be offering Rotterdam(blacked out in Netherlands) and Sao Paolo from the ATP Tour. San Jose will be blacked out in the USA. From the WTA, they will have the Doha -Qatar Ladies Open.

Next, for the Davis Cup, you can sign on to www.daviscup.com just to get updates and some great highlight clips. But if you want to watch the matches live and I mean almost all of the various Davis Cup matches around the world, this is a great deal. For $10, you can watch any of the Davis Cup matches around the world starting in Tokyo (Japan-Croatia) about 8:00 Thursday night in California. There are 8 first round matches in the World Group this weekend and this offers you a lot more opportunity to see great tennis than just the USA-Switzerland match on the Tennis Channel (which should be an exciting match in any case). You can sign on for just $10 for the weekend or even $5 for the day. If you had signed on for the annual pass for $50 before last weekend, you could have seen the Fed Cup matches as well.

Finally, you can always try LiveScoreHunter.com. I don’t think we are supposed to get it, but there is a tremendous amount of coverage in all kinds of languages available there. You have to fiddle with the computers and there are some commercials, but I watched the whole Australian Open with great commentators picking up the feeds from EuroSport (Mats Wilander and Frew McMillan) and Australia’s Channel 7 (Fred Stolle).

So there you have it. If you just want to watch the Tennis Channel and you can, great. If you want to watch something a little broader and have more choice, check out these websites.

10sChiro

Topics: Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer