Gilles Simon

The majority of football fans support a team, whether that is their local team, their dad’s team or the winning team probably depends on the person. Personally I’m the middle option; I support Everton because that is who my dad supports. When it comes to tennis it isn’t quite the same. My dad doesn’t like tennis, in fact it is probably the only sport he won’t sit and watch. Quite how golf or test cricket is a more entertaining spectacle I don’t know – but each to their own. If he was to have supported a tennis player I guess it would probably have been Jimmy Connors. Now as good as Jimmy was back in the day if I was to have inherited my choice of player then my schedule would be fairly light (in fact a little research tells me that he’s currently injured and not competing at all). No, tennis, like all individual sports, is a little different to team sports as each player has a limited career span. Going back to the football analogy, my support of tennis is like the friend everyone has who supports 15 teams. Mine supports Millwall, Newcastle, Reading, Arsenal, Celtic, Hearts, Barca, Inter Milan, Ajax, Gamba Osaka, Shandong Kuneng, Newcastle Jets, New York Red Bulls and Flamengo. I’d also be like the guy everyone knows who loves the lower league football, who’d much rather watch Burton Albion vs York City than West Bromwich Albion vs Stoke City.

Five years ago I was unlucky enough to find myself without a job and quite frankly without much hope of or inclination to get one. The usual sob story. To pass the time I started gambling, as you do and quickly found out I was good at it. Just as quickly I found out that perhaps I wasn’t after all. After a short but frustrating time not winning a lot but not losing too much either I started to notice some patterns and started developing some tennis systems. Most of these were comparable to “Lay the Draw” in their effectiveness but it was a start. Over time these evolved and became more sophisticated and eventually they sort of merged from separate trading ‘strategies’ to be applied in certain circumstances to an overall trading ethos. The essence of this ethos still stands today and in its simplest form it is to go against the grain. In the midst of this ethos I still occasionally had the odd strategy or challenge, for example the previously mentioned “Andy Murray is going to buy me a house challenge”. The middle of 2008 saw the first successful one size fits all strategy I had and that was to back Gilles Simon after he lost the first set. This was only really an extension of some of my other betting but nevertheless it bought in what was then my largest weekly profit in October 2008. I’ll likely never forget that tournament, it was the Madrid Masters and in the first round he came back from a set down to beat Igor Andreev (another favourite of mine at the time), in the second round he came back to beat James Blake, in the third he came back against Robby Ginepri, in the quarters he didn’t need to come from behind against Karlovic but in the semis he came back to beat Rafael Nadal. The week would have been perfect for this strategy if it wasn’t for the guy who was going to buy me a house. Incidentally I decided to stop blindly backing this at the end of the 2008 season which was probably a good thing because it wouldn’t have been profitable and in fact he probably lost more matches from a set up than he won from a set down.

Whilst some of my favourite players over the years have been so purely because of gambling success, Gilles Simon wasn’t one of them. (I realise that Simon isn't really the tennis equivalent of Burton Albion, but the next article about a player will be closer) The only reason I adopted this strategy was because of how much I already liked him. He was something different to pretty much everyone else on tour. By the time I started watching him in the beginning of 2007 he was already a top 50 player but it was clear he had something about him and it was only a matter of time before he was top 20 and who knew maybe even high top 10s. His slender frame made him stand out from the crowd but despite that it was incredibly rare that anyone bullied him on court. Whilst not possessing the hardest of shots his ability to soak up his opponents’ pace and redirect it back at them was magical. His timing was impeccable which is probably why he had such few unforced errors despite going long stints of the matches painting the lines from both the fore and backhand. 20-30 shot rallies were a common occurrence and, just like Andy Murray, despite looking like a counter puncher his timing allowed him to, out of nowhere, suddenly switch it up and hit winners (again, usually painting the line in the process). Furthermore whilst his French contemporaries, Richard Gasquet, Michael Llodra and Paul-Henri Mathieu were labelled as mentally weak and chokers, Simon often showed incredible mental strength. At the time the only other player that I could put in the same league mentally was Roger Federer, oh how I miss those mental giant Federer days. I’ve deliberately used the past tense because he was unlucky to suffer a few nasty injuries and although he is now back inside the top 20 and he still plays a similar game I feel he’s not quite the player he once was. I wonder whether this is in part due to him becoming a father, a topic worth further exploration in a later post. I still thoroughly enjoy watching him play but at the end of the 2008 season I had hopes of him staying in the top 10 for many years, something I doubt he is capable of now. I cheered his 250 level victory in Bucharest earlier this year like the majority of this nation did when Andy Murray won Olympic Gold. Allez Gilou! Whilst he’s not my all-time favourite player, his refreshing counter-punching style sees him comfortably in the top 5 and not just because he has an awesome name! 

On a final note I suspect the majority of people who vaguely follow tennis will recognise Simon from his outspoken comments regarding unequal pay for men and women at grand slams. “The equality in salaries isn't something that works in sport. Men's tennis remains more attractive than women's tennis at the moment.” Once again probably a topic for another day but I’ll end with Maria Sharapova’s response : “I'm sure there are a few more people that watch my matches than his.”