very personal blog Serena posted<\/a> about the breakup to see the pain she felt. The timing of her sister\u2019s engagement must have some sting to it.<\/p>\nPhysically Serena should be happy because she played all four slams last year and did no worse than the quarterfinals. On the other hand, she suffered injuries at critical times. She injured her calf at Wimbledon and reinjured her surgically repaired knee at the year end championships. At least she made it to the year end championships. That\u2019s a victory in itself.<\/p>\n
All things considered, Serena is in pretty good shape but that will not be enough to defend her title. Justine Henin<\/b> skipped the Australian Open last year to deal with her divorce and Serena\u2019s three quarterfinal losses last year were all to the same player: Justine.<\/p>\n
Jelena<\/b><\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the main reason to push the Australian Open back to the end of February: nobody is in match shape, people. If you\u2019re a French player and you live in Switzerland to avoid the high French taxes, you can run up and down mountains all day long, it doesn\u2019t matter, you still won\u2019t be match tough by the third week of the season.<\/p>\n
Look at the opening round match between Jelena Jankovic<\/b> and Tamara Paszek<\/b>. After splitting the first two sets, they got to 5-5 in the third set and both players forgot how to hold serve.<\/p>\n
Nine straight breaks of serve followed. Yes, nine. Paszek served for the match five times unsuccessfully. It\u2019s not that there weren\u2019t some great points, there were. Jankovic hit a beautiful stretch volley for a winner after a protracted rally featuring sharply angled shots that pulled both players off the court. That shot ended Paszek\u2019s third attempt at serving for the match.<\/p>\n
But for each of those points, there were two gimmes hit into the net or beyond the baseline. And neither player could serve anymore. Jankovic hit 14 double faults in the match and Paszek served five straight faults at one point. Jankovic also needed two injury timeouts for lower back pain that was visibly bothering her.<\/p>\n
They were like two drunken sailors throwing punches at each and missing badly. Here\u2019s the next suggestion for the Australians: join the 21st century, use a third set tiebreaker. It\u2019s not tennis after awhile, it\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n
Jankovic managed to find a way to win the match, 2-6, 6-2, 12-10. She deserves a lot of credit for that but it\u2019s not clear how long her body can last. She retired three times during Hopman Cup matches and now she\u2019s injured her back.<\/p>\n
Jankovic\u2019s fellow Serbian, Ana Ivanovic<\/b>, passed Jankovic in the standings last week and moved into the number three spot. Jankovic has repeatedly said that she plays tennis for one reason only: to reach the number one ranking. I think her shot at that may have passed, especially as Maria Sharapova<\/b> seems to be healthy again.<\/p>\n
If I\u2019m right and Jankovic does slide down the rankings to no better than fifth or sixth, I\u2019ll be interested to see how long she sticks around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can Serena Williams defend her Australian Open title? Can Jelena survive another 22 game third set? Serena While Serena Williams was obliterating Jarmila Gajdasova in her first round match at the Australian Open today, I wondered if Serena is in the proper state of mind to defend her title. Serena can\u2019t sneak into town this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,23,111,112,113,116,120,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ana-ivanovic","category-australian-open","category-jarmila-gajdasova","category-jelena-jankovic","category-justine-henin","category-maria-sharapova","category-serena-williams","category-tamira-paszek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}