Monday, October 26, 2009 11:34 AM
Women's year to close. . . sort of
There is an old adage that says, “a woman is never in a hurry and a man is never surprised.”
It doesn’t apply to women’s tennis and the Sony Ericsson Championships, which begin in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday.
By having its season-ending championships finish on November 1, the WTA Tour is clearly in more of a rush to wrap up the year, a full four weeks before the men’s ATP World Tour Finals come to a conclusion in London on November 29.
But nothing is ever quite that straightforward in tennis, so it has to be added that the women’s calendar does have another week next week – a new, sort of best-of-the-rest event involving 12 players ranked roughly from 10-25 called the Tournament of Champions in Bali, Indonesia, as well as the Fed Cup final with the United States travelling to Reggio Calabria, Italy, to play outdoors on red clay.
This week’s $4,550,000 (all currency U.S. dollars) Sony Ericsson Championships, with a potential $1,550,000 to the winner if she wins all her round-robin matches, will also decide the No. 1 ranking for 2009.
After a full year of tournaments, it comes down to Dinara Safina vs. Serena Williams – with Safina having just this week regained the top spot when the points from last year’s Sony Ericsson Championships came off the rankings computer. In 2009, Williams won one match and Safina none in Doha.
Safina now has 155-point lead (7731 to 7576), meaning that Williams must outperform Safina, whether it’s one match better in the round-robin portion (with each win worth 160 points) or in the ensuing semi-finals and final to finish the year at No. 1 for the first time since 2002.
With the elite eight players divided into two groups of four headed by Safina and Williams for the round-robin preliminaries, the luck of the draw has certainly gone Safina’s way. Here are the two groups with the players’ rankings in brackets.
WHITE GROUP MAROON GROUP
Dinara Safina (1) Serena Williams (2)
Caroline Wozniacki (4) Svetlana Kuznetsova (3)
Victoria Azarenka (6) Elena Dementieva (5)
Jelena Jankovic (8) Venus Williams (7)
Despite being in a seemingly tougher group, Williams will still be favoured, mainly because Safina has gone through a tortured few months – winning just three matches at her previous four tournaments, and going down (the worst loss ever for a No. 1) to a No. 226-ranked Zhang Shuai of China at her last event in Beijing three weeks ago.
At the 2008 Sony Ericsson Championships, Ana Ivanovic and Serena Williams withdrew with injuries before the end of round-robin competition. With the number of injury retirements recently at WTA Tour events, the outcome in Doha may turn out to be more a matter of "last woman standing" than which one is playing the best tennis.
Good call
The on-screen TV graphics at the WTA Tour event in Luxembourg last week were done with noteworthy discretion. For the point-by-point scoreboard during games, the abbreviated graphic, located in the corner of the screen, used just three letters from the surnames of the players involved.
It looked like the examples below for matches involving Shahar Peer against Daniela Hantuchova in the quarter-finals and Peer against Sabine Lisicki in the semi-finals:
PER
HAN
and
PER
LIS
Obviously, someone thought the better of using the first three letters in Peer’s name.
