Mario Ancic

By Mark Hodgkinson
The Telegraph

It was far too late on Sunday, close to midnight, when Mario Ancic did the usual tennis player celebration, dropping to his knees and leaning so far back that you worry about snapping bones. 'Super Mario' was happy - his was a cheque for £250,000 - but several aspects of Superset Tennis need improving.

This is not to say that the exhibition event, a new, offbeat format at Wembley Arena, did not put on a good first show in this country. It did, but there was still the sense that it did not go far enough in two key areas. That was almost inevitable, as although there had been a pilot in the United States, this was done on a far grander scale.

The first talking point is that Superset was marketed as short and snappy, but wasn't. Not quite. The evening session overran by over an hour, dragging the coverage out of prime time as Ancic and Greg Rusedski extended the final of this one-day, one-set event to 11-9.

The tie-break needs to be at a television-friendly six-all, as normal, not 10-all. Especially if the event is all about its denouement, offering the dramatic tension of a winner-takes-all prize. The organisers may have been led by what happened in America, where the matches were brief, but this needs to be changed.

The second talking point was the promise of 'wackiness'. It could have been so much wackier. The music-and-lights entrances were great value, especially John McEnroe hamming it up like a prize-fighter, but much of the pre-match extravaganza can be seen across Europe during the sport's indoor season. Something more than HawkEye is needed.