You know when you come off the tennis court having lost a close match, and you wonder if you were beaten because you are a slow-moving dolt or because your backhand looks like you are trying to scoop more Haagen-Dazs into a bowl? Of course, if the game had been televised, as it should have been, then IBM statisticians would have recorded every shot. They would flash onto the screen exactly how many unforced errors, double faults, long backhands and cross-court slices into the net caused your loss.

But soon, you will be able to say goodbye to that no-team-of-statisticians misery, with the IBM tennis coach. All you need is an audience of one, so long as that person has an IBM Thinkpad notebook computer, the Tennis Coach software, and the special Tennis Coach keypad. One push of the keypad records each stroke of the ball. The computer crunches the numbers, and tells you later exactly what you did right, and which aspects of your game need more practice.

The device, which is really a new version of the system used to record the stats at Wimbledon, is being piloted in Britain at the moment. IBM says it hopes tennis coaches all over the world will adopt the system, so expect the price to be reasonable.