Dubai: Omar Behroozian, the UAE's top tennis player, has called for an urgent fix for the sport in the country after lamenting the lack of development in the past few years.
"The standard, I mean, I've talked about it a lot before. I think that the standard needs to improve. It needs to improve a lot actually, in quantity and quality," wild card entry Behroozian told media after losing 1-6, 2-6 to Ukrainian Sergiy Stakhovsky in the first round of the Dubai Duty Free Men's Open.
"We don't have a lot of players. Obviously if you don't have a lot of the players you don't have a lot of competition going on. So even the players that you have are going to find it hard to improve.
"Our season starts in September and we haven't had a single tournament yet in the UAE. It's tough even for me or for Hamad [Abbas Al Janahi]. You can't just suddenly expect to play a tournament like this and perform at your best. It's impossible."
However, he can see a solution to the situation. "On paper it's simple. The first thing is you have to start developing players. You can't have ten players on the whole national team. It's impossible" he said.
"We have this tournament, which is great. It's supposed to be a great motivation to try to improve tennis, but since we started this tournament in 1993, it's still me.
"I'm still here every year and it's not my fault - it's because there aren't any players coming through, which makes life difficult for me. Because without competition, it's difficult for me to improve my standard.
"I'm hoping that once I quit tennis, once I stop, I can use my experience to help. Because I'm hoping within the next years we have to have a good player playing such a big tournament. But it's tough, very tough."
After a series of four Futures tournaments in the Gulf region, Behroozian's next major competition will be the Asia-Oceania Group IV Davis Cup tie in Qatar in the middle of April.
"Davis Cup is very important this year and that's our main goal for the season to try to get a promotion. We have a good chance this year, especially after we got the bronze medal in the Arab Games. We're looking forward to this tournament," he said.
