ATP: Yannick Noah sees (still) little light for the youth

French team boss Yannick Noah sees no light for the next generation at the Grand Slam tournaments.

Yannick Noah has a lot to do in the tennis year 2017, after all, the French Davis Cup captain’s team is about to play the final game against the Belgian team in Lille, and on the last weekend of November this year.Unlike the Belgians, Noah will be able to rely on rested-out players for that occasion – while Johan van Herck, the captain of the guests, is planning to play with a David Goffin, who has the best chance of qualifying for the ATP World Tour finals in London for the first time.

Goffin did not mention Yannick Noah in his inventory of the current men’s tennis, but of course the Belgian number one is also one of the victims of the domination of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic and, to a lesser extent, Andy Murray.

“The young players will probably have to compete with the top three players in an era,”Noah told the TV station ABC,”which is very unusual.Sometimes you have two, but never three.Nadal, Federer, Djokovic and Murray.It’s very hard to beat these players,” he said in 2017 – especially at the last Grand Slam tournament in New York, where Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic hadn’t played at all, and Roger Federer was far from his top form.

“To win a major, you have to beat one, two or three of the very greats.I’m sure 20 or 22 year-olds would have liked Federer and Nadal to resign,”Noah concluded with a light joke.But this is not the case at the moment, especially the Spaniard is still riding the wave of success.And at the first Grand Slam in 2018, the absence of Djokovic and Murray at the most advantageous draw could mean that a player will have to defeat all the “Big Four” on his way to the title.