Thursday, January 24, 2008

Happy me

What more could a tennis fan ask for, splendid tennis whenever you switch on TV and if it is a Grandslam then even better!
The first grandslam is going on and what a ride it has been, some upsets, some surprises, some discoveries
My train of thoughts about Australian Open 2008
1)Although I was never a fan of the William , I always liked their fighting spirit, it was such a shame that Serena went down without as much as a whimper in the quarterfinals against Jankovic.
2)The last time I saw Ivanovic, it was at the USOpen where she went down to VenusW, she almost looked like though she is a great player she is not grand slam material who would inevitably go down in tough situations but looks like ...she is got mentally tougher, her match against Venus and a terrific comeback in Semifinals says it all.
3)Although there were some good matches on the women's side I still think there isn't much depth in the current women's pool. Other than the top5-6 players, they seem to easily buckle under pressure
4) Coming back to men's Roger Federer and Fabrice Santoro match was fun to watch, felt sorry for Andy Roddick, Federer Tipsarevic match was terrific, Tipsarevic gave it all, he outplayed Federer in almost all areas, the one thing he couldn't do was break Roger's belief in himself. It was a tight rope match and Roger came out with flying colors(His serve was outstanding, haven't seen him serve so well)
5) Looking forward to Roger, Djokovic match, planning to wake up at 3.30am tonight to watch them :)
6) It was unbelievable that Nadal lost to Tsonga, If roger wins today it will be interesting to see him come up with answers for Tsonga, too bad if Tsonga buckles under pressure.
Before this loss, it looked like Nadal and Djokovic were on this giant crushing crusade, the players they were playing seemed like little hurdles on the way and they were all preparing for the one match, the Roger match. Nadal hadn't even lost a set before the semifinals... that's what they mean when they say Roger Federer has raised the level of tennis!
7) Every year AO seems to bring forth a fresh new face 2006- Marcos Bagtatis, 2007- Fernando Gonzalez 2008- Tsonga
7) Too bad Nalbandian went down so quickly... was his outstanding performance in 2007 just a flash in the pan?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I am with you Sania

Currently Sania Mirza is through to the 2nd round in the Australian open and might potentially face Venus Williams in the 3rd round. I read an article about her on Tennis.com.
She is just a 21 year old who is not only dealing with stardom, tons of money, pressures on court but she is also forced to deal with a ton of controversies and thanks to us-- Indians.
I do not understand why do we have to make big deal out of everything. If she had her bare feet very close to the Indian Flag, write an article about that and please forget that, don't go ahead and launch a full force legal case against her.
I agree she might not be one of the players on the top, she might meander around the 30-40s ranking and might eventually dwindle out but what is worth noticing here are the ranks that she has reached inspite of having grown up in India.
Why do I say this: last year I was in India for a vacation. My brother in law was a member of the international sports club(or something of that sort) which boasted of tennis courts.
Getting to play "an hour of tennis" itself and that too in one of most so called progressive cities in India, Banglore took us all day. The drive to place which was in the outskirts took us almost 2 and 1/2 hours. When we reached there we didn't even get good tennis rackets to rent, he first thought we were there to play badminton, anyways finally the court we played in was in pretty bad shape as well as way too expensive.
Compare that to playing in USA? you could literally find a tennis court every 5 mins of drive, joining a social league is just a phone call away or an email away.
Inspite of all this Sania is there and perhaps thanks to her we may soon see more youngsters playing tennis, frankly speaking I dont know how Sania did it.
and what do we give her in return? Controversies.
I think it is high time we stopped minding Sania's businesses and instead did something about infrastructure, something about affordability, something about instilling a love for sports in young children and truly salute the ones with the beacon...go Sania!

Friday, January 4, 2008

What is the sweetest sound?

Well if you asked that to a tennis player the answer will definitely be the sound of ---- opening a new can tennis balls which is only heightened by the anticipation of playing with the fantastically bright and perfectly firm tennis balls :)

On the flip side what is that that you don't want to hear? ... The Snap! the snap of your racket string. The first time it happened I didn't event recognize it and when I did I felt a wee bit proud of myself for having broken my first string and for having played enough to have broken one!

The fancy sure wore off the second time around especially since it was Christmas holidays and I was looking forward to playing tennis with tennis courts available round that the clock and to add to that none of the tennis pros were available to restring my racket. Fortunately for me a kind soul who was still in town agreed to restring my racket if I could bring the racket to his home.