Henry Ford once said “I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago” which is a fair point and sums up the recently launched Fast4Tennis. Touted as revolutionary, the T20 equivalent for tennis, by all accounts (and taking the commentary out of the equation) it failed. And it failed for the simple reason that it’s not innovative.

Take T20 cricket where the concept or the essence is the same as the One Day Internationals but changes the behaviour of the players. That wasn’t the case for Fast4Tennis. I’ll use extreme examples but players didn’t have to change hands depending on what side of the court they were, there was no power play where a player had one chance to hit a winner or lose the point, there was no compulsory serve and volley points – it was simply a shorter version of, well, tennis.

The other issue is that cricket needed to innovate – crowds at the game and on television – were down for the one day form of the game – tennis doesn’t have that issue. Grand Slams are well attended with no complaints – no one seemed to complain in 2010 during the Isner v Mahut match at Wimbledon.   2.14 million watched the last Australian Open men’s final – higher than the One Day match between Australia and England.

You therefore have to wonder whether this adaptation of tennis was truly designed as an innovation – which it’s not – or whether a ratings attempt – Seven’s Motorway Patrol drew larger numbers by the way.

We’re all for innovation but innovation needs to come from consumer/viewer unmet needs and at the moment, the current form of the tennis game is serving up what people want.