Tennis in Britain? Sounds about right. But in the Winter? Oh go on then.

This month saw the ATP World Tour come to the O2 Arena in London. This is quite a rare event for Britain; tennis in the depths of Winter. We go absolutely ga-ga over tennis in the summer with Wimbledon taking up two glorious weeks of the BBC's airtime and strawberries and cream coming out of our ears. It's a bit odd though to see tennis happening in November, not that I'm complaining. 

A tournament between the top 8 players in the world is always going to be worth watching. It's like Wimbledon only without all the chaff you get at the beginning. Once again Britain placed its hopes on Andy Murray and while he gave it his all he ultimately crashed out in the group stages. It wasn't all bad as you got to see Carlos Tevez having a knock around with Juan Martin del Potro while everyone waited to see if Murray went through or not. While Tevez wasn't brilliant by any means, he may consider taking up tennis instead of football. He'll probably win more games than at Man City...

It was an odd tournament really. Here in Britain to the casual tennis fan you'd think the sport would consist of Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. None of these guys won it, hell they didn't even get to the final. Both Murray and Nadal crashed out in the group stages, while Federer suffered an upset in losing to the eventual winner Nikolay Davydenko. 

As a tournament it was cracking stuff. Despite it being the end of the year all the players gave it their all. Moreover the O2 Arena made a magnificent venue. I was lucky enough to go there earlier this month to see Muse in concert. Who'd have thought that the Millenium Dome would actually become something useful?

Luckily the O2 Arena has the ATP World Tour for five years. Here's hoping that future tournaments are as good as the one that's just gone. 

How to solve play off drama in one simple step.

Get rid of them!

Honestly, why is this so hard to understand? Play offs are fundamentally unfair. Teams should be rewarded by playing consistently through a campaign. If they finish one spot behind the current automatic qualifiers/promoters then they should qualify or get promoted just as equally, not forced to play another round of games designed only to line the pockets of FIFA/UEFA/FA beaurocrats!

This case is perfectly highlighted by the Ireland vs France game last night. Ireland deserve to be in South Africa this summer, France do not. Ireland managed to go through the entire first qualification phase undefeated, despite being in a tougher group than the French. However, France will be in the World Cup. In what way, shape or form is this fair?

To compound matters, the way the French beat the Irish was through an act of blatant, if uncharacteristic, cheating by Thierry Henry. I'm not saying that the match should be replayed, that'd be ludicrous and open up a whole new can of worms. However, in order to prevent such monumental cock ups something has to be done.

Video technology has to be introduced, even if it's just in a limited capacity. It works in every other sport that it's been tried in, so why not football? People argue that it'd break up the flow of play but that's nonsense. In cases such as the one last night, how much longer would it have taken to check the videos than it did to stop players protesting?

This doesn't go for just play-offs either. It should be implemented across the board for higher level games. With football being the multi-billion pound industry that it is, shouldn't fairness be a critical issue?