dpDan Evans, the British tennis player who achieved a career-high ranking of world No. 21 in 2023, is bowing out of the sport in typically outspoken fashion.
Having announced last week that he will retire after this year’s grass-court season, Evans was unimpressed by Queen’s, the prestigious Wimbledon warmup in west London, deciding against giving him a wild card. “It would have been a classy gesture to give me a wild card, but obviously that was lacking on this occasion,” Evans told British newspapers over the weekend. The British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), which owns and operates the event, declined to comment.
And in an exclusive interview with the Tennis Podcast published Wednesday, Evans, 36, went into more detail about the problems he sees in British tennis.
Evans has barely played for 10 months because of injury, and lost to Daniel Jade, the then world No. 1447, in French Open qualifying last month. Since then, he has failed to qualify for the Ilkley Challenger, an event below the ATP Tour, and the HSBC Championships. On Tuesday, the All England Club announced that Evans had been awarded a doubles wild card for Wimbledon, after which he will retire. Evans has not received a singles wild card.
Evans’ partner will be Henry Searle, the 20-year-old British world No. 354, who Evans coached on an informal basis during his rehabilitation from injury. Evans said that in retirement, he would like to coach, backing himself to add value to British tennis.
“Where a lot of them (British players) should be is (top) 100. I think the coaching in this country now for a few years has been not going in the right direction,” Evans said during the interview. There is one British player in the men’s top 100 — Cameron Norrie — and four in the women’s: Emma Raducanu, Sonay Kartal, Katie Boulter and Fran Jones.
“Obviously there’s other reasons — club coaching, you can earn more money. Coaching players at that ranking, you don’t earn great money, let’s be honest. You have to do it for the love and trying to get them there. So I just think, there’s things I’ve learned along the way which could help,” Evans said.
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“Yeah, I don’t think it’s that complicated to get to the top 100.
“Hard work, keep your game style, a lot of practice. If you want to get better at something, you have to practice that sport. It’s pretty simple, if you want your forehand to get better, you have to hit more forehands, you have to practice it more. It’s not going upstairs to look at some data about the last match where you didn’t really try that hard. It is pretty basic to get to a certain level — is my opinion on the game, and no, my player won’t be doing all the other stuff until he does A, B and C right.
“I didn’t look at one piece of data in my whole career. Never wore a heart-rate monitor, neither wore any of it, and I did alright. It’s really not that complicated. You can make it complicated, but you can make it pretty simple as well.”
Evans, who was part of the British Davis Cup-winning team in 2015, added that, compared to his junior coaches, “the coaches are not of that caliber anymore in those positions, dare I say it, but that’s just a fact.”
“We don’t recognise the characterization of British coaching,” an LTA spokesperson said via email.
“We provide coaches and players with high-quality services and training facilities to ensure they can get the best out of their game.”
Evans’ career was eventful right from the start. As an 18-year-old, he had his funding removed by the LTA after going out drinking the night before playing in the Wimbledon boys’ doubles event. “It all helped me, to be honest,” Evans said of the punishment, and his frequent run-ins with authority figures, during the interview.
He was later banned from professional tennis for a year after testing positive for cocaine in 2017. In the Tennis Podcast interview, Evans described the pain of having to tell his parents about the catastrophic mistake he had made, at a time when he had climbed into the world’s top 50.
The son of an electrician and nurse with no tennis background in the family, the Birmingham-born Evans was a long way from the posh, southern stereotypes associated with British players. His game was similarly unconventional: standing at only 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) and playing with a single-handed backhand, Evans based his tennis on slice and feel and used those skills to make life difficult for much more powerful players for most of his career.
He reached the fourth round of both the Australian Open and the U.S. Open. At the 2016 U.S. Open, he held match point against the eventual champion, Stan Wawrinka, in the third round before ultimately losing.
Five years later, he beat the world No. 1 Novak Djokovic at the Monte Carlo Masters. In his on-court interview afterwards, Evans said that Djokovic keeping him waiting at the start of the match got Evans “a little extra fired-up.”
“It’s one of my pet peeves with the better players — they like to be late a lot to the call for the match. It’s some ego thing — if you’re late, it’s just rude, isn’t it?” Evans said during his interview with the Tennis Podcast.
Evans added that he maintained a good relationship with the top players, one of whom, Roger Federer, was so impressed by Evans that he invited the Brit to train with him on numerous occasions. After beating Evans in three tight sets at the 2019 Australian Open, Federer said that it had been like facing “a mirror.”
At that same Australian Open, Evans demonstrated once again his refusal to mince his words, rubbishing Jamie Murray’s suggestion that doubles guru Louis Cayer should be made LTA national performance director across all disciplines.
“Jamie (Murray) thinks we should be celebrating six pairs inside the main draw of a Grand Slam?” Evans told the Daily Mail at the time.
“So we are celebrating people who didn’t make it at singles and people who didn’t have the attitude to work hard enough to make it in the singles game.”
In response, Murray described Evans’ comments as “lazy” and “ignorant” in a news conference.
Asked for his current views on the topic during the interview with the Tennis Podcast, Evans said: “First and foremost, we need to start getting singles guys in the top 100, not No. 1 in the world at doubles.
“My comments about ‘they don’t work hard enough’ probably wasn’t correct in part. Maybe some of them, after their singles career where they weren’t working so hard, then decided to work very hard at doubles, would probably be more the truth.”
Having rebuilt his career after his one-year anti-doping suspension for the positive test for cocaine in 2017, Evans reached his career-high ranking of No. 21 in August 2023 after winning the biggest title of his career, the Citi Open in Washington D.C., a 500-level event.
A year later, Evans did not return to defend his title, in order to play the 2024 Paris Olympic Games men’s doubles event with Andy Murray, who was retiring after the tournament. By doing so, Evans lost 500 ranking points and saw his ranking tumble 118 places, from No. 58 to No. 176. But he won two thrilling matches with Murray, saving match points in both, and earned widespread praise for his personal sacrifice to play in Paris.
In the interview, Evans described the experience as “one of the best moments of my career.”
Andy Murray and Dan Evans won two remarkable matches at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Evans was never able to get close to the world’s top 100 after that vertiginous drop in the summer of 2024, but that August he won the longest match in U.S. Open history, defeating the No. 23 seed Karen Khachanov in 5 hours and 35 minutes after trailing 4-0 in the final set. Last June, Evans fought back tears after defeating the world No. 13 Tommy Paul to reach the quarterfinals of the Eastbourne Open.
But he has won only three tour-level matches since, and none since July 2025. He has played just six matches in 2026 because of a wrist injury, winning one of them.
Evans said Tuesday that he is hopeful of receiving one of those two remaining singles wild cards. Evans, a popular player with British fans for his exciting game style, fighting spirit and outspokenness, may still get one last hurrah after all.
