ILE rolling non-slam Tennis thread

1-6 4-6 1-6 for Simon against Bandy is not much better. Point and laugh at the entire nation of France.

Wait, what, "Bandy" is Ferrer? Man, have I been misreading these threads for years.

no, "Bandy" means only Tired Lex. I AM SO TIRED THIS WEEK/FORTNIGHT/MONTH :(

that's OK, I'll point and laugh at France for you, k?

http://espn.go.com/tennis/story/_/id/7007705/li-na-says-dip-form-related-mental-toughness

"All the active women tennis players have the same situation of ups and downs in the competitions, almost everyone," Li said Friday at a sponsorship event. "Because women cannot have the same mentality of men, who expect to win every competition.

"We are very easy to be satisfied after winning a championship and we like to leave some time for self-adjustment. So this season is coming to the end, and there is still some time, several months ahead of the next season. I will try my best to prepare well for the competitions of the next season."

And this, in a nutshell, is why Clijsters and Serena were able to waltz back after long layoffs with dubious fitness and steamroll most the current women's elite. I hope Stosur doesn't buy into this nonsense.

Oh I think Stosur will work very hard and continue to be hungry. She'll put up a decent show at the YEC, where she's defending SF points, and is one of the players who can actually beat Wozniacki on hard courts at least.. but I'd say the chance of her following up with a strong showing at the AO is pretty slim.

kmt Na, try telling that to Steffi

I've seen so many male players over the years with that mindset too

I was going to say that, but obviously Steffi, Serena, Martina I etc were actually man-mentality-having FREAKS of nature. Oh Na, go back to being amazing pls.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SERENA ILY xxxxxxxxxxxx

Kaia Kanepi d. (1) Caroline Wozniacki 7-5 1-6 6-4

if maria keeps her shit together this nightmare could be over soon (woz at #1 that is)

also lol @ losing to kanepi

Kanepi is exactly the sort of player that Wozniacki WOULD lose to if the WTA weren't full of chokers - huge weapons off the ground and actually before injury was showing ability to measure those strokes and construct points, push opponents back rather than just going BANG BASH WINNER NOW (except actually hit massive unforced error instead)like frigging Gajdosova. Plus she looks quite slim.

That plus an Ivanovic loss is making my day so much better.

Oh and A-Rad beat Jankovic? SO MUCH LIFE!

KAIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOVE that girl. I'll enjoy her hot streak whilst it lasts before she loses to some random loser every week again. Ugh I've been so out of touch since US Open. Is Tokyo being streamed? Is it on Eurosport? WTF is going on in the tennis world

You missed Jeepers fucking Scheepers winning a WTA title last week.

Kvitova/Sharapova Wimbledon final rematch, Petra serving well so far...

eww @ Scheepers

awww @ Bardina beating Larcher de Brito. A win!!!

Ma$ha just served and fell straight over o_0

And retires. Ligament tweak, thinks Sam Smith. Well, that was an anticlimax for the first tennis I've seen since the USO.

um wtf did not see that. how weird :/

sad but after everything after wimbledon I will take advancements for Kvitova no matter how they occur. Bark!

can't believe bartoli took azarenka to a 7-5 set

Here at KL ATP. Honestly, only came by to catch up with a former colleague and fellow tennis fangirl I worked this tourney with two yrs ago but she bailed at the last minute. so now I'm stuck here on my own watching the ode to baseline bashing that is Almagro V Ramos.

Sad to see attendance still hasn't improved but the small crowd here at least seem pretty devoted. Can't believe Almagro fans exist anyway.

Can you buy tickets on the spot at that KL tourney? Or you have to buy them somewhere else?

Yes you can. You in town Jibe?

Yup. I might go see a game, could be fun. I'm gonna ask a silly question, but that is an indoor tournament right? I don't know if I could stand the heat&sun if it's not.

hehe thankfully it is cause honestly, I wouldn't be able to stand the heat either. It should be fun - there will probably be a bigger crowd over the weekend too.

WTF.. Kvitova had 5-1 and ended up losing 6-7 0-6 to Bepa. Did anyone see this? Was this massive choking idiocy, an UE-fest, Bepa improving, all three, what the hell SERIOUSLY

Will try and go if i'm not too out of it on sunday. Even with bigger crowds i guess it won't be impossible to get tickets. Also, I might not have been looking in the right places but I don't think I've come across any ads for this tournament... except for one radio ad in a taxi this morning.

Oh I had this nightmare of Bepa taking out Petra and then losing to fucking Azarenka in the final, but A-RAD has taken out the trash first! Yes!

Of what I saw of Petra yesterday, she was serving well but not really imposing in any other way. Bepa can handle her serve for some reason so this result isn't too surprising, though the scoreline is ridiculous. She'll probably lose to A-Rad in the final though, A-Rad's beaten her twice this year and Bepa's big final record is appalling.

Funny, A-Rad has played really well every time I've seen her this year and has visibly improved a lot of her weaknesses, yet there she is, still stuck just outside the top 10 in the rankings forever. And then I remember her massive fails at the last two Slams.

and her serve, forehand and backhand

Her last slam fail is made a little bit better by the hindsight of what her opponent went on to do, kind of, sort of, maybe... (/end making excuses for my occasionally/often useless faves)

her BH has always been a weapon and her serve is what's massively improved this year. the FH, yes, well, but then look at Our World No 1.

Wozniacki's virtually sewn up year-end No 1 for the SECOND YEAR RUNNING OH MY FUCKING GOD, hasn't she

God I hate that she's played consistently better than anyone else, the bitch.

i wouldn't call her backhand so much a weapon as it is not as laughable as her forehand

hitting hard is not everything

Funnily enough Woz's 2011 is anything but consistent. Lot of first-round losses in that there record. Sharapova has very arguably been more consistent and has a slam F and a SF.

Yeah, Wozniacki is anything but consistent. Three opening round losses this year (Sydney to Cibulkova; Toronto to Vinci; Cincy to McHale) and early round losses to Goerges, Hantuchova and Kanepi. Sharapova has no 1R losses but she has lost early to Voskoboeva, Pennetta, Arn and Cibulkova.

The reason Woz is #1 by so much is because she's won 6 titles to Sharapova's 2. Even discounting international-level Copenhagen, that's 5 Premiers or over (ie the ones that should count). The trouble is she's very adept at sweeping the weaker Premiers like Charleston and Brussels in inconvenient spots in the calendar, hence lesser fields showing up for them.

In fact, no one else comes close to Wozniacki in terms of titles won. Kvitova is next with 4 (3 Premiers and over). Then Vinci with 3 (all internationals, lol). Sharapova, Li and Serena have won two Premiers or over; Zvonareva and Azarenka have won one premier-or-over and one international.

And if there is to be a solution to Wozniacki it's not to devalue the non-Slams any further. (Not unless you really hate women's tennis and only want it to be a sideshow to the men in Slams, because if no one cares about the tour then that's all it will be.) All these other bitches have to start bringing it whenever and wherever they play. It's not hard. Steffi did it. Hingis and Davenport did it. Serena did it for that one year. All the top men do it (and if Rafa can do it, I want to hear no whining about how the game is so physical now from the ladies).

hitting hard is not everything

omg :o

but srsly radwanska has zero rackethead acceleration and her groundstrokes/serve are harmless. this is probs why she never beats anybody good (serena/venus/clijsters/henin/kvitova/sharapova other than that one time)

http://espn.go.com/tennis/blog/_/name/bodo_peter/id/7038377/tennis-year-end-no-1-wta

damn, Bodo

But things changed dramatically in the fall of 2008, when Jelena Jankovic rose to No. 1 and kept the ranking until the first of February

no

no no no no no NO

such a superficial analysis the "slamless no 1" debate had been raging since 2000, when Hingis held it by a huge distance despite Venus sweeping the whole second half of the year.

(I don't see a real difference between "No 1 who has never won a Slam" and "No 1 who has won a Slam, but doesn't hold one now" - it's the same maths that leads to both situations, and I don't think having won a Slam back in the mists of time mitigates it.)

(Actually, it had happened before Hingis too - Austin in 1980 and Graf in 1991 both were No 1 for a few weeks each without holding a Slam. Any ranking system that's based on a year's results is going to be playing catch-up to an extent because, duh, players' form doesn't come in handy 52-week blocks.)

After Hingis, you had Clijsters, who iirc held it in the brief interim after Serena got injured in '03 but before Henin's dominance caught up. Then Davenport who seemed to constantly be No 1, and end the year there, years after her last Slam, mostly because she used to sweep the Euro indoor events in the autumn all the time. Oddly she didn't seem to get as much stick as Hingis had #nationalism. Mauresmo got there in '04, too. All of that was down to exactly the same maths that has led to the swapsies of recent years.

Anyway the actual root of this situation is in 1997, when the WTA changed from a divisor system to an additive one, which privileged those who played more and allowed players to discount bad losses. Hingis becoming No 1 so soon that year despite holding one Slam to Graf's three was the first ridiculous consequence of that. And this situation has been with us ever since then, only disguised when one player is dominant enough at the Slams - Serena '02, Henin '03 and '07 etc. But what the Williamses kick-started was the trend of visibly not caring about No 1, because they weren't interested in playing as much as it would take to get there (once they'd got there for the first time). And that seeped out to the rest of the field. You don't get a sense that any former No 1 is going to bust a gut to get back there.

It's not just the system though - under any system, wacky results => wacky rankings. No sensible ranking system could possibly make a current Slam holder No 1 right now. It's getting to the stage where the Slam winners' inability to deliver in more than 2-3 events a year is devaluing winning a Slam as well.

The dirty secret of the ATP is that its ranking system is very similar. But for the past eight years, they've had very orderly, sensible results. So you'd only notice if you paid attention to some of the wacked-out things happening beneath the top 30 or so.

Anyway this is a perennial complaint of mine. If Serena repeated her 2002 over the next 12 months she'd be No 1. And no one would complain or say a thing. But it'd be the SAME SYSTEM with the SAME PROBLEMS. It doesn't suddenly become a problem when the results go mental and you end up with Jankovic at No 1. That's because the results are mental.

(still think the actual most ludicrous thing about points allocations right now is getting 100 points for a 1R Slam win. 100! Even if you've just beaten some random wildcard bumpkin or one of the many Slumpy McSlumps populating the tour at any given time. And then 160 if you win your 2R - ie you get fewer points for coming through a seed's section than for winning 1R over anyone. w.t.f seriously who thought of that. There are some players who are seriously overranked beneath the top 50 because of this.)

The ATP have had the additive system since 1990, isn't that right? Back in the '80s, it was a divisor system - every result counted - so you couldn't have anomalies like Kafelnikov becoming #1 after six straight first-round defeats (as I think he did in '99). They've tinkered with it ever since - ditching the bonus points for wins vs highly-ranked opponents, extending the number of tournaments that count, enforcing the "super nines", etc.

I remember the ridiculous fuss about Lendl becoming #1 in early '83, without a Slam to his name (just amazing dominance everywhere else, particularly indoors, and seven straight wins over McEnroe)...

lol @ you, zvonareva

well done tipsy

LILOLLOLLILOL def by Niculescu 4 & 0

OH DEAR.

FORMER world No. 1 Martina Hingis is expected to make a return to grand slam competition at January's Australian Open with a view to chasing London Olympic gold with Swiss compatriot Roger Federer.

Hingis, 31, has not contested a major tournament since the 2007 US Open, but is understood to be contemplating a two-pronged involvement at Melbourne Park next year.

Two pronged? Hope that means doubles and mixed because I fear the most perfect woman to walk the earth losing to idk Dulko or Hercog or someone in singles might make me cry. Though I would die happy if she actually won RG. Which she will not.

Nonetheless totally going if she plays! Will fake media credentials to go to press conferences.

Meanwhile wtf scoreLINA did Dolgopolov just lose by?