Foot Fault!

Every time a player comes out firing against Caroline Wozniacki, bulldozing their way through the first set, the commentators never fail bring up this line;

And it never happens. I touched on it after Andrea Petkovic’s win against Wozniacki in Miami, but clearly it needs further addressing. The bottom line is that it’s almost impossible to keep that level up for two whole sets, and at some point in the match the nerves and errors will come. Karolina will love and devour them, before quickly grinding her way to the win. After the match, the commentators won’t hesitate to describe the win as ‘incredible’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘unbelievable’, but it’s neither. It’s just how she rolls.

That said, she hasn’t looked particularly good this week. The clay really doesn’t suit her game because while the hardcourt bounce giving her shots more weight and power, her strokes tend to sit up on the clay stuff, making it so much easier for her opponents to execute. That coupled with the fact that she moves even worse on clay than she does on hardcourts, and we have a problem.

Up next for her is Jelena Jankovic. This really should be one match to far for Wozniacki, as though there have been various hiccups along the way, Jelena really is improving her form with every tournament. Her controlled aggression should be too good for Wozniacki, particularly on the clay. However, this is the WTA, and I for one won’t be counting any chickens before they hatch.

The other semifinal will be between Shuai Peng and Elena Vesnina. It’s quite a shock – though Shuai has been in top 10 form all year, I don’t think anyone expected her form to continue on clay, even green clay. But here she is. Meanwhile, Elena has been in pretty dire form since her brilliant 2009 season. Sextape or not, it’s great to see her playing well again.

Yesterday, Novak Djokovic made the tough decision to withdraw from his “home” tournament in Monte Carlo due to a recurring knee injury. Check out what he had to say below;

Good decision, really. It serves no purpose for him to put his body at risk so early into the claycourt season, particularly considering how well he has been playing this year. Last year the whole dust allergy thing really crippled his whole clay campaign. Glad to see he isn’t making the same mistake twice. That said, I’m sure he’ll live to regret telling everyone where he eats his lunch – some of them tennis fans are c-r-a-z-y.

Dinara Safina was forced to withdraw from the quarterfinals of Marbella with a lower back injury while down 1-5 in the first set against Victoria Azarenka.

Does this girl have any luck? After winning through to her first quarterfinal of 2011, this was such a great chance to go all out against player playing as well as Vika has been playing. But of course, as it has been for the last year and a half, any time she begins to take positive steps forward, injuries and bad luck inevitable comes along and pushes her back again. It’s just so brutal to watch her getting the wind punched out of her every single times things start to look up for her. Let’s just hope this is nothing serious and she’ll be back in Fes.

Earlier on today Caroline Wozniacki posted a picture of her after a hit with Fernando Gonzalez and Andy Murray. The accompanying tweet;

Now she knows how all the other women feel when they play her, eh?

If you remember back last year, Andy made some pretty controversial comments regarding women’s tennis, saying that no woman would beat a player in the top 1000. I was pretty disappointed – not so much because of his comment, but because the person who asked him the question was an idiot, branding Women’s tennis a “joke” and pointedly asking the question with the intention of putting them down. It’s one of those times that, as the question is asked, you pray that the player will reply with the correct answer – Vera did earlier this fortnight, but Andy didn’t, simply humouring and aiding the bigot. But I’m glad that, as trivial as it sounds, he thinks well enough of the Women to share a court with a player and hit with them as he did today. You’ve redeemed yourself, Andy.

We heard Andrea Petkovic tell the press that she would be retiring the ‘Petko Dance’ after this week, and after defeating the German 3-6 6-0 6-2 yesterday, Maria Sharapova wasted no time in dismissing the dance into the depths of hell;

Q: [Andrea] thought you would be tired in the third after the long match you had the previous night. Didn’t seem to be that way.

Sharapova: Because I didn’t do the dance after. I wasn’t tired.

[...]

“So first and foremost I felt like I had to start doing that and making little steps and adjusting my game a little bit. More than anything, I sensed that she was tired – probably a lot of the dancing that she’s been doing – and I took advantage of it.”

I’m sure I’ve already said this, but I just love the off-court Maria Sharapova of 2011. Thinking all the way back to 2003/4 when she first burst onto the tour, she always came across as so robotic and, I guess, cold. But since she initially picked up the shoulder injury and her struggles in 2007, she has transformed into a completely different person – not only is she much more open, honest and personable in her interviews, but the snark and sarcasm as exhibited here is truly delicious. Long may it continue.

The unbeaten run continues. Yesterday, Novak Djokovic exacted revenge on South Africa’s Kevin Anderson to move into the final four in Miami, notching up his 22nd win of the year. Anderson beat Novak here back in 2008 – his other slam-winning year, but today was a different story for Anderson as he put on a great performance yet left with a mere six games to show for it.

Up next for Novak is newly crowned US number one Mardy Fish in the semis.

Well, yesterday was interesting.

Ok, no. Who am I kidding? Yesterday was BATSHITICULOUSLY FUCKING CRAZY. Even now I’m still struggling to understand and come to terms with exactly what happened on that fateful day. Three WTA matches were scheduled for the day, and all three produced the most mind-boggling, head-shaking and face-palmngly crazy results.

After going through my usual routine of scouring the interwebs for quotes and anecdotes from the players following the matches, the one quote that really stuck out for me came from Maria Sharapova after her 3-6 7-6(6) 7-6(5) victory over Dulgheru.

“Sometimes it takes more than just playing well.”

And that’s just it. We can go on about how atrociously bad Maria played, finding herself fighting for her life in a third set tiebreak against a certified claycourter (well, I guess ‘Warsaw-courter’ would be a little closer to the truth). And believe me, it was horrendous – she managed to notch up a grand total of 74 errors and 17 unforced errors. We could then also talk about the other atrocity of the day in Andrea Petkovic’s 2-6 6-2 6-4 victory over Jelena Jankovic, with Jelena regressing back to her form in 2010 as she managed to muster up a 4/25 set. Yes, that’s 4 winners and 25 errors. But it serves no purpose. The bottom line is that both Maria and Petkovic fought tooth and nail, gritting out the ‘W’ and dragging themselves into the semifinals somehow. Maria’s win was made all the more remarkable by the way she sprained her ankle late in the second set yet gathered herself to finish off the match.

Of course the match we all wanted to see was the battle between the resurgent Ana Ivanovic and Kim Clijsters. It was easily the match with the most potential for high-quality tennis, and from the sounds of it, it more than delivered. Of course that meant that, after the rain delays, the tournament decided to stick it out on court 2, in front of no cameras. In a nutshell, Ana managed to lose 7-6(4) 3-6 7-6(5) from 5-1* 0-40 up in the third set. Ouch.

Andrea Petkovic notched up the win of her career in Miami, outlasting the in-form top seed Caroline Wozniacki 7-5 3-6 6-3 to move into the quarters of a Premier+ for the first time in her career.

Before this match, I didn’t give Andrea Petkovic a chance in hell of defeating Caroline Wozniacki. After seeing so much of her off-court last month in Paris, I have come to like Petko in spite of that intolerable dance and the twitter craziness, however that doesn’t change the fact that she’s still a painfully one-dimensional run-of-the-mill power baseliner (bear with me, I’m not just trashing her for no reason – this is actually going somewhere) with no redeeming qualities against a wall like Wozniacki, right?

Wrong.

Instead, the German number one put on a tactical master class that her fellow players should watch again, again and again. There was none of the usual brand of tennis that some love to so affectionately call “brainless ballbashing”. Andrea said it herself in the post match interview;

“Most of the players think they can overpower Caroline, but it’s the wrong approach”

Damn right. Today she sat back, giving Wozniacki different heights, angles and shot patterns to deal with, effectively telling Wozniacki to come at her, with herself being aggressive only when the opportunity presented itself. Remember, the hot topic of the town has been Wozniacki’s newfound aggression recently, and thus she was initially happy to oblige. However, as Petkovic continued to vary her shots, Karolina’s poor technique was completely exploited as the errors flowed and flowed. She quickly attempted to reign her game in, but the result was the same, with Petkovic pouncing on the inevitable shanked short ball that came after their long exchanges. I also love that when Andrea attacked, she mostly attacked crosscourt in order to use the full angles of the court, creating openings for her to run forward and finish points off at the net with drive volleys. Needless to say, it worked.

Before I hype Petkovic to death, I should regress and highlight that with 52 errors from Karolina and 59 from Petkovic, it was an ugly match all-round as Wozniacki struggled to overcome her mental fatigue while nerves continually creeped into Petkovic’s game. But Petkovic’s plan wasn’t to play a faultless squeaky-clean match, rather it was to ironically bring Wozniacki’s level down, putting the ball into different areas of the court and forcing her into errors, and it worked, so ‘bravo’ to her.

So, I was minding my own business and watching the beginning of John Isner vs Alex Bogomolov when Barry Cowan randomly blurted out that Bogomolov used to be Anna Kournikova’s hitting partner. My first thought was to fly to Miami and murder him out of pure jealousy, and then my second one was to cross-reference to check if it was actually fact, before landing myself in jail. Thankfully, the second thought won out, and lo an behold, it was true. Google kindly directed me towards an old article from 2003 of Bogomololovolov discussing his friendship with Anna, and I feel compelled to share it here.

It’s interesting, and pretty satisfying to see how far he has come since back then. So often you read about the top players who were groomed for superstardom from such a young age, but starting from scratch and slowly moving up the rankings is the reality of so many more players around.

So you’re at Barney’s shopping with your best friend Anna Kournikova and you don’t even realize you’re being photographed. Such is the life of Alex Bogomolov, a Russian-born American tennis player.

Alex Bogomolov hopes to get his ranking into the top 100 by the end of the year.

“I love spending time with my best friend Anna Kournikova,” Bogomolov said from the Dominican Republic. “We’re best friends. We grew up playing together in Russia and had a fall off because she was playing in the U.S. When I came back from Mexico to Miami we caught up.”

Bogomolov said when the pair hang out in Miami, it’s no big deal, but whenever they’re at a major tournament like the 2002 U.S. Open in New York people notice.

“We were just shopping and I’d never had the experience of paparazzi before,” he said “It was pretty cool to see what they made up. They said we were holding hands and kissing, but we were just shopping.”

At this year’s Australian Open, the Sun Herald of Sydney suggested that while it’s acceptable to “pat your partner on the bum every so often” in sports, did Bogomolov have to do it on every point?

But Bogomolov says it’s not like that, and in fact, he appreciates the advice he’s been given by the former No. 8 player in the world (even if she’s never won a WTA title).

“She’s helped me tremendously,” Bogomolov said. “Last year I was struggling trying to make it on the futures level, and we sat down at her house and she really inspired me. She told me, ‘You have to work your ass off.’

“She jumped started it for me. After that I won a couple of futures and one challenger in Pueblo to win the year.”

After the Pan Am Games, Bogomolov is hoping to get a wild card to the Tennis Masters Series in Cincinnati and by virtue of his appearance at the Pan Am Games will be at the U.S. Open.

His best friend Kournikova won’t be out there playing. She’s still rehabbing and trying to move a little bit right now, he said.

“We stay in touch every day on the phone and support each other as much as possible,” Bogomolov said.

And for those of you thinking he might be able to hook you up with her — please don’t ask.

“They have to talk to her not to me because I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Bogomolov said. “Hopefully, people will start asking her if they can take me out.

“I’m still waiting.”

But in the meantime, at least he’s not waiting to get back in the game. He’s already there.

“Back with a vengeance,” Bogomolov said.

Also have to laugh at the bolded snide little remark from the writer, in which they feel compelled to point out that Anna never won a tournament as if it disqualified her from giving out advice. WHATEVER!

(Via ESPN)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HCAwXCaxnQ

Well I’m sorry Jelena’s agent, but you just got outed. And I’m glad you did, because if it was Jelena who was actually controlling those accounts, I may have had to disown her out of sheer boredom.