Sean Calvert: Wild card madness needs an overhaul

Baghdatis has received eight wild cards already in 2014

In his latest column, Sean Calvert casts a critical eye over the wild card system in tennis and concludes that it's not fit for purpose...

Marcos Baghdatis is one of the most well known names on the ATP World Tour and a familiar face to tennis fans worldwide.

He's also been the beneficiary of a mind-boggling eight, yes, eight wild cards in the current 2014 ATP World Tour season and Grand Slams.

Last week I talked about the wild card handed out to the returning Viktor Troicki after his doping ban and doubtless the Serbian will find himself with more between now and the end of the season, but what are the rules and why has Baghdatis been allowed so many?

The answer lies, as many things do, with the wooliness of the ATP World Tour rules, which allow tournaments pretty much to do what they like in that regard.

The first sentence in paragraph one of section 7.12 of the ATP World Tour rulebook of 2014 gives us the gist and it reads:

"Wild cards are players included in the main draw at the sole discretion of the tournament."

There's plenty more in there of course, but not much is relevant to the average player until we get to the limitations on the amount of wild cards each player is allowed per season.

One would think that it would be limited to say, three or four, and they do limit it in theory to five, but there are plenty of ways around that rule, as Baghdatis highlights.

Indeed, the first paragraph in 'Limitations' shows us this by stating:

"Wild cards shall only count toward the annual limit if the player would have been a direct acceptance on the original acceptance list."

So, lets apply this to Marcos's season and we see that the very first event of the year that the Cypriot played was in week two at the Heineken Open in Auckland, where he was given a wild card.

That one wouldn't count towards his five for the season because at the time he was ranked outside the top-100 in the world and the last direct acceptance was number 63 Paulo Lorenzi.

There are also a lot of exceptions for players who've been ranked at number one in the world or those who will turn 35 that year and have been Slam champions or World Tour Finals winners.

So, basically anything goes, within reason, but looking at what Baghdatis (and there are plenty of others) did with his wild cards this year we see that he lost in the first round in Auckland and Houston and in the second round in Memphis, Delray Beach, Acapulco, Queen's Club and Wimbledon.

A third round in Miami is the best he's done of those eight wild cards this season and surely it would have been a better idea to have given some of those opportunities to young up and coming prospects.

This is nothing against Marcos - he just happens to be a good example - but at 29 his best years are behind him and if I were a tournament director I'd be looking at the young talent, of which there is plenty, and giving some of them a go.

Of course there are commercial considerations to be made, but someone like Baghdatis is hardly likely to put many more bums on seats at the majority of events where he was given a wild card.

Local players are always likely to get wildcards and there's not a lot wrong with that, but some tournament directors/owners really take the mickey with their choices - and I'm thinking of Ion Tiriac at the Madrid Open and his regular hand out to fellow Romanian Marius Copil here.

Copil has a 14-20 record on the main tour and he's made one Masters 1000 first round elsewhere - and he lost that to Guillaume Rufin in Miami last year - yet Tiriac gives him a leg up in Madrid each year that equates to almost €13,000 and 10 ranking points just for losing in round one.

A cap - and one with no workarounds - is surely the way forward, because we don't want a situation either where young players are getting softened up by getting so many that they don't have to play qualifiers, as started to happen to Jack Sock.

An even more worrying example could be found as recently as yesterday when talk of the tour Alexander Zverev, who at 17-years-old thrilled us all with a great run to the semi finals in his home town of Hamburg - where he was a wild card - lost 1-6, 0-6 to Diego Schwartzmann on another WC in Kitzbuhel in a dreadful performance.

There could even be a system implemented on the ATP Tour whereby all wild cards - or at least most of them - are decided by some sort of play-off tournament and similarly to fill up the dreaded bye position in round one of most events.

Some should be held back for injured players returning and the like, but the evidence of this season at least suggests that qualifiers perform far better than wild cards in ATP World Tour events.

This can help us with our bets, especially on outrights and early round match betting, as I found only four players all season who have made the semi finals as a wild card.

Only one of those - Bernard Tomic in Bogota a fortnight ago - made the final and the other three were 'home' players. Igor Sijsling in Rotterdam, Thomaz Bellucci in Sao Paulo and Zverev in Hamburg.

Qualifiers have done much better, with Pablo Cuevas winning in Umag last week, as did Martin Klizan in Munich, while the vast majority of wild cards lost in the opening rounds.

Apply this to Kitzbuhel this week and we see that two of the three wild cards are out without winning a set and other David Goffin is a 2.56/4 shot to beat Philipp Kohlschreiber today.

There will be one qualifier into the last eight in Austria for sure and Albert Ramos is a 34.033/1 shot to emulate Cuevas and Klizan go on and win it.

This week's other tournament, Washington DC, is a good example of younger players getting a chance, with 16-year-old prospect Francis Tiafoe and 20-year-old Canadian Filip Peliwo handed opportunities.

They also gave one to Tomas Berdych, which is fair enough as a top player, and the Czech is a 4.57/2 chance to emulate Tomic and become a wild card tournament winner. My preview of that tournament can be found here.

For me, the wild card regulations need looking at, with a view to limiting them properly and if each individual WC has to be approved first then so be it, but eight in not even a full season for one ageing player is ludicrous.