The Australian Open is finished, Davis Cup is days away, and the golden clouds are gathering over South America, ready to release their usual spray. It seems like an appropriate moment to release The Next Point Annual 2012.
Free to download – there is no feasible way to pay for it even if you wanted to – this volume includes nearly all of my articles from throughout the 2012 season, starting with Abu Dhabi and concluding with the Davis Cup final.
The introduction I provided for last year’s annual remains largely pertinent to this one. The only thing worth adding is that the new volume is even longer, so if you do print it out, don’t drop it on your foot. I don’t know where I stand legally with that. As before I have re-edited some of the articles, in order to correct the worst grammatical howlers, and only when the intended meaning grew so subverted that it courted solecism. The factual errors and the errors of judgement, on the other hand, remain untended.
Many readers have pointed out that my tennis writing is not like most other tennis writing. Partially this is a matter of temperament, since I’m inclined to write in a way that some might consider old-fashioned, or at least in a way that resists the innate ephemerality of the internet. Consequently, I tend not to include very many links, and I only very rarely embed video. My personal view, as a writer, is that words should be sufficient, and that if they aren’t, then I need to find better words. It means that compiling a year’s worth of pieces into a single volume is a comparatively straight-forward task. They were mostly written with something like this in mind, anyway. So, aside from being a matter of temperament, it was a matter of design.
The reason I do it at all, however, is largely a matter of personal satisfaction. I hope you enjoy the new Annual, and thank you sincerely for all your support.
The 2012 Next Point Annual can be downloaded here.
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