It'll Be Lonely This Christmas Without Andy Murray

Sports commentators have developed a style of expressiveness which, at moments of triumph, combines a knowing tone of we-knew-it-would-happen-didn't-we with a precision of stating each word as though followed by an imaginary full stop. We might describe this inflection as "doing a Motson", after its earliest known exponent. Dan Maskell would never have intoned thus. The only way we knew Dan was still with us was when he would stir from his slumberous drone with a suddenly animated "ooh, I say" with which to startle awake his television audience. Sports commentary of the current day has, by contrast and thanks to Sky, Five Live and talkSPORT, added hypomania to the Motsonic glottal stop. And so it was the other day. On a whooping Five Live. "Rafael. Nadal. From. Manacor. In. Mallorca."

The words had a strange effect on me, one of a sense of territorial superiority. It was the specific mention of Manacor that emphasised it. I know that place, thought I, even if my acquaintance with the town is limited to sitting in a rush-hour traffic-jam. Nadal has gone from being from Spain, to being from Mallorca, to being from Manacor. It is no longer sufficient for commentators to refer just to the island. Nadal's celebrity has made him über-Mallorcan. The detail of his Mallorcan-ness grows with his every Open championship; at the Australian we can expect to learn the names of all his neighbours. Dan would never have stood for this. He wouldn't, for example, have let on that Roy Emerson came from Blackbutt, which was probably just as well.

Nadal is famous not just for coming from Mallorca but also for being the only famous Mallorcan ever. There are others who have had fame thrust upon them, but they are famous for not being famous, like the Catalan author and polymath Ramon Llull. No, Nadal is that famous that he has become Mallorca, or is it the other way round. And he is one of us. Which of course he isn't, if you happen to be British. But Nadal has been adopted because of the alternative - the Scottish Player, one forever cursed by monotonic moroseness and by slipping up in the third round, so it is best not to mention his name in order to avoid the bad luck that doing so would bring.

One of Nadal's virtues lies with his being perceived as "a nice boy", something to which the Scottish Player would find it hard to aspire. It is this, together with the fact that he is the only Mallorcan anyone has ever heard of, that secures him gigs as the face and chest of Mallorcan (Balearic) promotion. And Nadal has just won his first US Open. Now might be the time for a bit of Mallorcan marketing stateside. The only problem is that tourism chiefs are spending their time either about to go into prison or in China, enticing a breed of Chinese tourist with promises of cheap bazars on every Mallorcan high street. That's not the only problem.

Sadly, despite Nadal's celebrity, tourism promotion involving him has been a complete disaster. Admittedly, it doesn't help having an uncle/trainer who slags off Parisians as being "really stupid" when you've forked out 400 grands worth of promotional budget to target the French market - as was the case during last year's French Open. And it also doesn't help when the director of Spanish tourism in Paris agrees with Uncle Toni. A tourettic momentary lapse of diplomacy perhaps, but it was symptomatic of the Nadal nadir of Mallorcan tourism marketing.

What else, with hindsight though, could you have expected? We now know, courtesy of testimonies before the judge in the corruption case involving the tourism promotion agency (IBATUR), that there was such uncontrolled and unmanaged profligacy at the agency that it doubled the money for the French campaign in providing for a museum of tourism that never came about, while it is alleged that the agency was never subject to proper financial governance. If the agency was capable of playing fast and loose with public money, which it was, it was equally capable of being incompetent when it came to doing what it was meant to do - marketing. Nadal should seek to distance himself from any association, however indirect, with the agency's cowboys and their legacy.

But Bon Nadal, good old Mr. Christmas, will probably find himself still featuring in ads on some obscure channel at two in the morning, just after an equally obscure sports commentator has finished his Motson at the end of an under-19 handball event from the Ukraine. And come Christmas, as the holiday ads start to kick in, he'll still be there, floating somewhere in satellite land. But at least he will be there, unlike the Scottish Player; you wouldn't even get him as the face of a wet week in the Highlands and Islands. It'll be lonely this Christmas without ... Don't say it, just don't say it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.