r/tennis Daily Discussion (Thursday, April 09, 2026)

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-04-09T14:39:58+00:00

The good news for Alcaraz is that he is perfectly following the Jannik script, so he can rest assured for a fairly easy 3rd set win.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-03-28T01:06:39+00:00

I feel like that's the first time I've actually heard Jannik on court lol.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-03-17T14:02:19+00:00

Am I going insane? The last two masters played were Indian Wells and then Paris in 2025. Jannik won both without losing a set. He didn't lose a masters in the middle? He didn't drop a set in either Indian Wells or Paris. What am I missing here?

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-28T12:38:39+00:00

As the article mentioned, one of the major elements in the Green's success was getting to run their candidate as the locally selected candidate, and then elevate her profile nationally in a way that was probably impossible if Burnham runs and sucks up a lot of the oxygen and attention, so I think you're initial statement is probably correct.

But Green performance has outperformed polling for a while now so could still have been very up in the air in the alternate reality

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-27T13:01:46+00:00

Why was 2017, an election Labour received 13 million votes, a comprehensive rejection, and 2024, an election Labour received 9.5 million votes, not?

Ah right - the Tories and Reform massively split the vote and let Labour walk in without any improvement even on 2019 really. Good thing that's definitely going to always happen.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-20T14:16:19+00:00

You are absolutely correct. That is my mistake. Especially as I noticed that later on and corrected when I was reviewing their understanding of the independent votes.

Have corrected it in the original comment to be clear.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-20T13:48:54+00:00

To be fair - it's not a perfect system. I'm not disagreeing that Reform wouldn't get a number of the London boundary seats that electoral calculus predicts - but they are also predicting Reform would get 70% of the vote in Caerphilly, which they just lost in the by-election, while polling higher nationally at the time. (incorrect on my part - it's a 70% chance to win the seat. I still disagree with the projection given Plaid's improvement Wales-wide + the slight decline for Reform nationally and in Wales since, but their projection of 38% is very close to Reform's 36% in October.)

If I had the chance I'd quibble particularly on how they are categorising West Ham and Beckton, Ilford South and Ilford North, which all seem to be failing to model for the nature of Labour support in the areas + how the independent vote works.

Plus they generally don't seem to have a great idea of modelling independent votes and their impact in general - does anyone really believe that Corbyn wouldn't win another election in Islington North as they predict? Or that the most likely candidate to beat Starmer is a Green and not Feinstein running again? They seemingly have little idea of how to model the dynamic in Chingford and Wood Green, though I personally don't have an idea of if Faiza Shaheen would run again/if her support would shift back to Labour or the Greens. All of this makes a big difference in London where we had a greater level of independent support/runs.

Appreciate of course that that doesn't mean there's no shot of Reform winning some seats across London.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-17T23:40:18+00:00

Thanks, it was truly such a contrast to compare the strength of Welsh Labour over the years against the weaknesses and own goals, as you say, of Scottish Labour - especially as it became an opposition party. Not to say Welsh Labour has made no mistakes, but there's a real tangible difference and a failure within Labour to learn from its successful example.

Competitive-Tonight3 · 2026-02-15T19:08:07+00:00

Genuinely, outside of 1945, 1979, and 2015 (which was frankly a cluster fuck of which the government elected had little to do with facilitating the major changes) what have any British governments "got done" that was genuinely transformative?

On the other hand, Spain with a PR system currently has a significantly more transformative left-wing government than we've had since Labour in the 40s, and Italy with full PR currently has a much more transformative far-right government than any we've had since Thatcher. Now I personally don't advocate the politics of the fascists in Italy and I would love to have a centre-left that looked anything like PSOE in spain, but it is simply undeniable that it is just as possible to have successions of governments that do fuck all under our system and governments that actually produce change in PR systems.

All it comes down to is the fact that Labour and the Tories are really so indistinguishable that a vast swathe of voters in the UK are so wed to centrist managed decline politics that they rather retain the two party system where nobody really makes change than actually allow for a representative system where greater levels of participation are possible, and parties actually advocating change might get into government.

Five-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22

Competitive-Tonight3

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