The new Andy Murray: He's 15, blond, superfit and his name is Nicola Kuhn

Nicola Kuhn  prepares to receive serve against Yuichi
Sugita on Valencia's 3000-seat  Centre Court

British tennis fans may have a long wait for a successor to root for once Andy Murray passes his sell-by date.

So how about a blond 15-year-old superkid whose truly international pedigree adds instant irresistability to his image as the best young prospect in the game?

Nicola Kuhn is also considerably better looking than misery-mouth Murray - and, unlike the sour-faced Scot, has also been known to smile when he wins.

A multi-cultured European, young Nico is not so much on the ladder to international stardom. He is already halfway there - as the best player on the planet born in the 21st century. And while he will technically be a Junior until 2019, next year is likely to see his big breakthrough.

Two weeks ago, the Austrian-born superkid led Germany to the grand final of the Junior Davis Cup, winning an unparallelled 11 successive singles matches in a competition involving 134 nations. In the final against Canada, he comfortably beat Felix Auger-Aliassime, whose rocketing success against senior professionals on the ATP circuit has been grabbing headlines all over the world - not least on Youtube.

HIS NAME IS BLOND.....GAMES BLOND,

Nico's reward for his achievements this year was a Wild Card entry to last weekend's qualifying competition at  the Valencia Open, n ATP World Tour event won in 2014 by Andy Murray and this year featuring world No.7 David Ferrer and controversial Australian Nick Kyrgios among the seeds.

When he stepped on to the Centre Court for the first time on Saturday, Nico was  just three matches from a head to head with Ferrer or Kyrgios in the main draw. The sting was that his opponent was world No.132 Yuichi Sugita, a Japanese Davis Cup veteran and 12 years Nico's senior.

Ultimately, Sugita's subtle experience brought him a 6-2, 6-3 victory that was considerably less comfortable than the scoreline suggests. In fact, he was almost lost for words when he was told after the match that Nico is 15 years old.. "Un-be-lievable,'' he gasped. "Never in my life have I seen a player so young who can play that good. He is a star in the making, for sure.''

Nico's training and playing kit is as colourful as his tennis

So who exactly is Nicola Kuhn and why am I touting him to become one of the game's biggest names? Well, let's just say he looks the complete Tennis Super-hero  package, complemented by a squeeky clean image that is already endearing him to mums and dads as much as to teenage fans. 

Nico's roots are fascinatingly complex. Born in Austria, his family moved to the Costa Blanca when he was three months old. His father, Alfred, is German, mum Rita (from whom he inherited his blond complexion) is Russian and they live in a predominantly British urbanisation at Torrevieja. Nico speaks Spanish, German, English and Russian fluently...and if you push him regarding his nationality, he will concede quietly that he feels more Spanish than anything.

Which suggests that a major decision could be in the pipeline over his future tennis loyalties in team competitions like Davis Cup.

By the time he was three, the Kuhn kid was begging his parents for a  tennis racket - and he's been besotted with the game ever since. He also demonstrated almost instantly at Torrevieja Tennis Club that he is a natural, winning local and regional events at every childhood level.

By 2012, even the great Boris Becker was talking about him, describing the 12-year-old prodigy as "a better player than I was at his age.'' 

Nico with his tennis mentor Juan Carlos Ferrero in 2013

It was around that time that another tennis legend, former World No.1 Juan Carlos Ferrero, came into Nico's life. For the past four years, the youngster has been commuting daily between his home in Torrevieja and Ferrero's prestigious Equilite Tennis Academy at Villena, near Valencia. 

The exhausting 208-kilometre round trip to combine tennis practice and academic studies would drain any normal human being. But Nico is a one-off - he supplements the travel torture with an intense  training regime that burns off a cool 5,500 calories a day. 

His tennis advisers at the Equilite, headed by coach Fran Martinez, are determined to keep his feet on the ground, which is why they are not particularly partial to articles like this one eulogising their most valuable young asset.

I understand their logic, but I'm a professional journalist and this is a good story full of positive vibes. So, with apologies to those who want to keep his CV under wraps, I hereby introduce the new 007 of teenage sport to you.

He answers to the name of Blond. Games Blond, that is. You could even try calling him Nico Teen but that's as near as he's ever likely to get to the vices of youth culture.

The last 12 months has seen Nicola rocket more than 1,000 places up the world junior (19 and under) rankings. By the end of this year.he will be in the top 40 - and one of the youngest as well.

However, Nico has already thrown his hat in with the professionals, having won his first ATP ranking point in May this year, two months after his 15th birthday. To understand the significance of that statistic, Rafael Nadal was six months older when he achieved the same feat.

FACTS AND FIGURES: Nicola Kuhn (born March 20, 2000) is a junior tennis player whose run of 11 successive singles victories helped Germany to reach the Final of the 2015 Junior Davis Cup. He was subsequently voted the worldwide tournament's Most Valuable Player.

Kuhn, who won his first ATP ranking point in a Futures tournament at the age of 15 years two months, was brought up in Torrevieja, Spain. His parents, German businessman Alfred Kuhn and his Russian-born wife, Rita, settled in the Costa Blanca when Nicola was three months old.

Nicola showed a keen interest in tennis from the age of three, when he asked his parents to buy him a racket. "I dreamt of being a professional tennis player ever since I can remember,'' he says. 

At the age of 12, Nicola switched his tennis allegiance from Spain to Germany, whose tennis authorities offered to help with his equipment and travel expenses. He also joined the prestigious Equilite Tennis Academy at Villena, near Valencia, run by former world No.1 Juan Carlos Ferrero, where he was able to supplement his fledglng tennis career with his academic studies.

In February 2014, Kuhn emulated Rafael Nadal (2000) and Andy Murray (2001) by reaching the final of the prestigious Les Petit As under-14 tournament in Tabres, France. He ended the year ranked No.4 on the Tennis Europe 14-and-under Junior Tour rankings, despite playing in only seven tournaments. His individual successes during 2014 included the European Masters title in Calabria, Italy and the Nike International Junior tournament in Bolton, England, He was also a key member of Germany's ITF World Team Championship winning team and their viictorious Tennis Europe Winter Cup trio. Feeling that Nicola would benefit from tougher opposition, Nicola's coach Fran Martinez and support team began to enter 14-year-p;d Nicola into ITF 18-and-under events. Competing against players up to three years older than himself, he won two lower-grade tournaments in Shenzhen, China before his 15th birthday, which he celebrated by reaching the last 16 of his first Grade 1 tournament in Umag, Croatia.

Kuhn's first taste of senior competition saw him win his first ATP ranking point at Lleida in May, 2015, while at Junior level he continued to rack up ranking points and entered the world's Top 100 for the first time. In October, he qualified for his first US Junior Open, losing in the last 32 at Flushing Meadows. A few weeks earlier, he had inspired Germany into the Junior Davis Cup finals with an immaculate singles record in the European qualifying event at Le Touquet.

Competing against the world's top 16 nations, Nicola again won all his individual games to lead his adopted country to the JDC Final in Madrid, where they lost 2-1 to Canada. Kuhn's consolation was that he was voted the tournament's Most Valuable Player and in beating the much-vaunted Félix Auger-Aliassime in straight sets, staked a justifiable claim to be the world's best player born in the 21st century.

In late October, Kuhn reached the quarter-final of the prestigious Osaka Mayor's Cup event in Japan, and achievement which lifted him to No 70 in the ITF Junior rankings,

And finally, Nico meets the woman of his dreams...ME

For Fawkes sake, Britain's good Guys must blow up this American Halloween plot

I BLAME it on the Americans. In fact, I blame everything on the Americans - they are big enough to take it. Even the ones who weigh less than 20 stone (or 280 pounds in the Land of the Rising Gun).

I’m talking about the over-the-top Halloween hoo-ha that has whooped its way into Britain...and all but killed off one of the nation’s most treasured occasions.

When I was a child, Guy Fawkes Night was one of the biggest days of the year. A tradition marking the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, it commemorated a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of provincial English Catholics.

The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament - something I doubt many British 10-year-olds these days know anything about.

Kids in the UK today are more concerned with Halloween, where they are free to frighten the lives out of  old ladies by donning ­horrific masks and demanding sweets with menaces.

I wonder what you get if you ask for a ‘trick’ rather than a ‘treat’? Does one of the little demons remove his mask and turn out to be Paul Daniels?

To me, the Guy Fawkes culture of my youth was so much more embracing.

For days, even weeks before the event, we’d go from door to door with makeshift effigies of Fawkes and implore householders to give us ‘a penny for the Guy’.

Then, as darkness fell on November 5th, the neighbourhood would gather for a fireworks spectacular in which Guys galore would go up in smoke on top of a massive communal bonfire.

How that delightful tradition came to be usurped by the hideous ‘trick or treat’ culture, I do not know.

I believe Halloween has Celtic origins and was originally a pagan holiday in honour of the dead.

But I honestly cannot remember anyone celebrating it when I was young.

We may have started it - but as with everything else, the world has pinged it back in our faces with interest.

But I yearn for my grandchildren to enjoy the atmosphere of Guy Fawkes Night as I did more than half a century ago.

November 5th has a special place in my heart. And nobody will convince me that the Halloween takeover was not a devious plot by those over-the-top, razzamatazz Americans. A fat lot of good they've done to our heritage.

But what do you expect from a nation that dresses rugby players up as Bouncy Castles?

Wales, the All Blacks and Howard Kendall - a whole new bawl game

MY beloved Wales may be out of the Rugby World Cup, but I reckon we won almost as many new friends as did the nippy little dazzlers from Japan.

Warren Gatland’s injury-ravaged squad were on a hiding to nothing after losing key backs Lee Halfpenny and Rhys Webb in their final warm-up game against Italy. By the time they faced South Africa in Saturday’s quarter-final, they had been reduced to taking the field with two fourth-choice backs in centre Tyler Morgan and fullback Gareth Anscombe. Not to mention a brilliant fly-half in Dan Biggar whose goalkicking preparations include a passable impression of the symptoms which led to my being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

A hwyl new bawl game: Michael Caine in Zulu

That we beat England at Twickenham and ran Australia and the Springboks so close is testimony to the never-say-Dai spirit known in Wales as ‘hwyl’. If you don’t know what hwyl is, try nipping over to South Africa and asking a few descendants of the Zulu warriors who overran our (Rorke’s) Drift defence. Not that we managed to beat the South Africans in 1879, either. Must be down to having Englishman Michael Caine as our commanding officer - but not a lot of people know that.

For all Wales’s courage, at least we went out of the 2015 Rugby World Cup with our honour intact. That is more than can be said for the French, who found themselves suffocated by a black New Zealand cloud in Saturday’s second quarter-final. The 62-13 scoreline suggests that South Africa will also be blown away next weekend and that Richie McCaw’s champions will become the first nation ever to win two World Cups in succession.

Football has had its great international teams like Brazil and Germany, cricket had the era of West Indian invincibility and, more recently Australian dominance. But only in rugby union has a single nation dominated the world game throughout my lifetime. A tiny nation with a similar three-million population to Wales, not to mention around 80 million sheep.

Howard Kendall during his Blackburn Rovers days

HOWARD KENDALL achieved a lot in football. In fact, he was a legend. At 17, he became the youngest ever FA Cup finalist, later captained Everton to the Football league title in 1970, and for good measure went on to become the Toffees’ most successful manager ever. He also liked a drink, which became more and more apparent in his increasingly flushed visage at Goodison Park press conferences as the years rolled by.

I don't think he'd had a tipple the day he laid into me at Ewood Park. But I have never forgotten the rudeness of the Blackburn Rovers player-manager at that impromptu after-match press conference in the early 1980s. It was during the early days of hand-held tape recorders and this particular inquest was held in a corridor near the changing rooms with perhaps a dozen reporters milling around.

I was armed with notebook, pen and an untested tape machine. Fearing that the new gadget might not work, I quickly pressed the record button, placed my notebook on top of it, and stood jotting down Howard’s words with my other hand. I made no attempt to hide the machine, which Kendall spotted immediately.

“If you’re going to use one of those things, at least have the decency not to try to hide it,’’ he rapped, clearly irritated and pointing to my notebook sandwich. It would have been bad enough had the innuendo been correct. But this was positively embarrassing.

I’ve spent the last 30 years wanting to put the record straight so if you are listening up there in God’s-Own Park, Howard, now that you know the truth, I accept your apology. However, it’s too late for you to climb up there alongside turnip head Graham Taylor and West Ham’s genial John Lyall as the most polite and approachable managers I came across during two decades of covering League football for the British tabloids. There were also bosses and players some of my colleagues preferred to avoid. Keep reading this blog and I may just tell you about them....

As for Howard Kendall, he and I did have one thing in common. My other half and I called our two daughters Hayley and Lisa – and so did Howard and his wife.

It's my birthday. Welcome to the zimmer season in Guardamar

I USED to love birthdays. Particularly those big ones with a zero on the end. The ones when your boss would send you home early to have a quiet family celebration…only for all hell to let loose when you opened the front door.
One moment, silence and slight concern that nobody was in. Then, as you peered into the deserted hall, an explosion of noise as doors flew open, laughing faces appeared from nowhere, the kids rushed into your arms  -  and 100 voices burst into a chorus of you know what.
The party would go on forever as you ate, drank (too much) and caught up with the lives of surprise visitors from out of town and friends you’d all but lost touch with. Your boss and the colleagues who had masterminded the show would turn up after work and the party would go on through the night.
Yes, life was fun at 40…and blowing the candles out was a piece of cake.
How times change. Birthdays used to take forever to come round, yet I swear I’ve had four of them this year.
And the only good thing about the damned things is that if they keep coming, you know you are still alive.
I’d better amend that, because I don’t want my friends and to think I'm not going to enjoy our little celebration this weekend. Around 15 of us are taking our zimmer frames, hearing aids and skin tucks for a bit of a bash in Guardamar. It isn’t going to be a night at the Hilton, but the Portico Mar is considerably more salubrious than one or two of my previous birthday bashes,
Like when I opted for the bustle and boom of Vicente Jaen’s chaotic restaurant, where plates of freebie food fly at you from all angles before you even give your order – and then you are submerged by enough food to fill a herd of starving elephants.
There’s no written bill and the only till is the wad of notes tucked away in Vicente’s pocket. It’s all a bit of a shambles, really…but as irresistible as the march of time. Not the Ritz, more of the Pits, really  - but the chaos is pure magic.

In the chaos at Vicente's, my plan for a table for 20 was redrawn as a 12 and an eight and I spent the evening  sitting with my back to most of my guests. The experience confirmed my mathematical theory that the volume of noise generated by a boozing Brit is directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed. The longer we celebrated, the louder some of us got (not me, of course)  - and the more disgusted looks headed like daggers in our direction.
It was all good fun and great to have so much support in the absence of my family, who are all in the UK.
One thing I did notice in the haze of alcohol (two gin and tonics - I can’t even get drunk these days) was that there were no candles on the cake.
Perhaps Restaurant Jaen is a no-blow zone, I thought. Because I could definitely have seen off all those little sticks of flaming wax. Well, three or four anyway. I can only eat a few in one sitting.

The FIFA File: Why did it take so long to Blatter seedy sexist Sepp?

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2010, A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE WORLD CUP IN SOUTH AFRICA. THE QUESTION IS, WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR THE AUTHORITIES TO BLATTER SEEDY SEPP AND HIS CORRUPT REGIME?

During Spain's march to glory in last summer’s World Cup, I wrote a magazine article in which I described Sepp Blatter, the most powerful administrator in world football, as ”an ageing plonker”. I now accept that at the FIFA chairman is not ageing. He’s decrepit.

Sepp Blatter...decrepit and sexist

Indeed, he is so far past his sell-by date that I suggest his native Switzerland considers putting him out of his misery. Euthanasia is perfectly legal there, after all.

Now I love football but, like just about every fan in the world, I think its administrators are in another world when it comes to moving into the 21st century.

Even if those decisions are patently wrong and unfair, as they often are.

Take England’s disallowed goal against Germany, for instance. Frank Lampard’s rocket shot bounced down off the crossbar at least a yard over the line and then came out of the goal – and the referee and linesman were seemingly the only two people in the stadium who failed to spot it.

The German goalkeeper knew it was a goal, of course. But since honesty is the last thing one expects from professional footballers (we won’t mention being faithful to their wives), there was no way he was going to tell the referee. Let’s face it, England would have done exactly the same had it been the Germans who scored, so dishonours even there.

However, had the referee merely been allowed to consult a video replay, as are officials in other major sports, justice would have prevailed. As it was, nobody knows what might have happened had England been level at 2-2 at halftime rather than 2-1 behind. Why, they might even have won. (well, in my dreams).

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a player or manager speak AGAINST the use of video playbacks to confirm or over-rule controversial refereeing decisions. And the argument that the delay would detract from the game has long since been shot down by the evidence of other sports. In rugby and cricket, for example, the anxious wait for decisions like ‘not out’ or ‘no try’ to appear on the screen invariably ADD to the excitement rather than detracts from it.

Time you went to Specsavers, ref...Frank Lampard's blinding shot is a good yard over the line

Yet Blatter and his fellow FIFA duffers have consistently resisted calls for any sort of technology. And that has inevitably led to people like myself asking ‘Why?’

And in the absence of a logical reason, I can’t help pondering the recent corruption allegations over FIFA’s decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia.

Now I am well aware of the laws of libel, so I am not saying someone is bribing Sepp and his sidekicks NOT to say yes to the technology companies. But it makes you wonder, particularly as Blatter’s election in 1998 was later sullied by allegations that an African federation official had been offered a 100,000 dollar bribe to vote for him.

Certainly, Blatter’s logic seems to be at variance with the entire population of the world. Apart, perhaps, from his cronies in Geneva, all of whom are presumably blokes. And that brings me to another negative aspect of the man’s background.

Seedy Sepp does not seem to hold women very high in his esteem. Indeed, he seems to see us merely as sex objects. According to Wikipedia, in the early 1970s he was elected president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, an organisation which tried to stop women wearing tights instead of stockings and suspender belts.

Then, in 2004, he angered female footballers when he suggested that women should “wear tighter shorts and low cut shirts… to create a more female aesthetic” and attract more male fans.

I’ve got news for Mr Blatter. If he spent more time sorting out football’s injustices and less on ogling the girls, then it might start living up to its billing as ‘the beautiful game’.

He could start by introducing a law that works wonderfully well in rugby and ensures that cheats who illegally prevent a certain score don’t prosper. In such circumstances, referees can award a ‘‘penalty try’’ – yet in football, the worst a team can suffer is a red card for the offender and a penalty kick for the cheated side.

When a Uruguay player prevented Ghana winning their World Cup tie by deliberately stopping a goalbound shot with his hand, the correct decision should have been ‘goal’ – even though the ball did not cross the goal line. The incident happened at the very end of extra time, so the red card did not help Ghana in any way.

And when they missed the resultant penalty kick, any advantage was completely wiped out.

Uruguay celebrated their reprieve by winning the penalty shootout that followed and Africa’s last representatives in the tournament were on their way home when in the eyes of every fair-minded person they were really the victors. But the concept of introducing a ‘penalty goal’ award to foil the cheats has probably never crossed Mr Blatter’s mind.

Ghana did not get justice, they were robbed because the laws are an ass. It’s the sort of thing that makes football appear even more stupid than the heads-in-the-sand brigade who run (or should that be ruin?) the game.

So how is football ever going to be dragged into the 21st century? Maybe we should offer sleazy Sepp an inducement to hand the whole caboodle over to us girls. Then we could sort it all out in no time and let him concentrate on whatever else he does for kicks.

England v Australia: From rugby zeros to conquering heroes in 80 minutes

UNDER FIRE: England captain  Chris Robshaw and coach Stuart Lancaster

A WEEK of recriminations over England's humbling by Wales has done nothing to ease the pressure on skipper Chris Robshaw and his beleaguered Rugby World Cup troops.
The Twickenham inquest has merely cranked up the pressure on the men the media and the fans hold responsible for the sweet chariot crashing on the final bend. And if they shoot themselves in the foot again against Australia tomorrow (Saturday), Robshaw and coach Stuart Lancaster could well find themselves travelling home with their opponents. To Botany Bay.
If England's fickle fans have not already gunned down the suffering sheriffs, that is.
One of the starkest after-match contrasts between St George and the conquering Dragons was the reaction of the ostensibly 'British' media to Wales's 28-25 victory. In their overseas edition, the nation's top-selling tabloid scarcely gave Sam Warburton's wounded heroes credit for their unexpected second-half comeback. Instead, Welsh, Scottish and Irish expat readers had to endure five pages in The Sun on England's demise, two of which were devoted to former captain Will Carling sticking the knife into Robshaw and Lancaster.

Those looking for a tribute to the injury-decimated Welsh's unlikely victory at England HQ by had to settle for a few short paragraphs on their mouting injury problems plus assistant coach Sean Edwards' revelation of just how much the result meant to everyone in the Principality.
Edwards, once a never-say-Dai English rugby league hero, said: “At Sunday mass, the priest came out and put his hands in the air to celebrate. That's when you know you are making a difference to the nation.''
Carling's condemnation of England's decision to go for a match-winning try rather than salvage a point from a 28-28 draw is rich, coming as it does from a man whose decisions, by his own confession, cost England the 1990 Grand Slam.
Had Robshaw's spurning of a three-point penalty produced the last-gasp victory he and his team were aiming for, the media would have him up alongside Martin Johnson today as an England all-time legend. And Lancaster would be licking his lips at the prospect of emulating Sir Clive Woodward, the coach who led the nation to the 2003 World Cup.
Beat Australia, as Woodward and his captain Johnson did in the 2003 World Cup Final, and last weekend's cock-up will in just 80 minutes be completely forgiven, if not forgotten.
Regardless of yesterday's Wales v Fiji result, England can still make it to the knockout stages. But it will take a monumental effort to beat a Wallabies team that beat the mighty All Blacks in a Bledisloe Cup match in Sydney just a few weeks ago.
Until Wales replaced them this week, the Wallabies were officially ranked No.2 in the world behind the All Blacks. Michael Chieka's men will have just one target at Twickenham tomorrow – and that is to achieve the equivalent of what their cricketing countrymen failed to do this summer.
By putting the boot into the ashes of English rugby.

Japan's rest-case scenario

THE challenge of peaking twice in just four days proved too much for rugby's greatest giant-killers – much to the delight of a Scotland team who caught poor Japan on the rebound at Gloucester last week.
It was quickly apparent that a fresh Scottish side playing their first game of the tournament would be too great an obstacle for the shock conquerors of mighty South Africa.
Scotland's 45-10 victory also highlighted the unfairness of a system that gives some teams up to three days more rest between games than others.
Ironically, England have had the best deal of all – with at least a week between each of their three games so far.
Their conquerors Wales, on the other hand, were given just five days to recover before facing the physical might of Fiji last night (Thursday) with the longest list of injuries in the competition.Japan suffered more than any other nation, their 96-hour recovery period after the Springboks match also involving a venue switch from Brighton to Gloucester.
All of which makes a powerful case for the organisers of the next Rugby World Cup in Japan to balance the recovery time of all competing nations.
The hosts of RWC 2019 certainly won't argue with that one.