Serena gets revenge for Venus; injuries strike

MELBOURNE, Australia

Serena Williams had insisted that she did not want Carla Suarez Navarro to get in the habit of beating members of her family at this time of year, and Saturday, under clearing Melbourne skies, she ensured that nothing of that sort would happen again by defeating the Spaniard 6-0, 6-3.

Twelve months ago, Suarez Navarro had caused one of the major upsets of last year’s Australian Open by beating Venus Williams. “I think, maybe, Serena hits the ball even harder,” she had told me. “But I will do my best.”

Well, Carla, who is 5-foot-4 if she stands up very straight, did not have to wait long to discover just what kind of power the younger Williams sister can generate. The score was 5-0 before she could blink. But then, to her credit, she started chasing everything in sight and proceeded to save no less than seven set points in the sixth game of that opening set.

Time and again, Serena would get herself in a winning position only to be foiled by one more Spanish return and, at one stage, having fluffed another awkward volley, she fell back onto the court and sat there, contemplating the frustrations of the game.

Having finally clinched it, Williams broke quickly at the start of the second and was never really in trouble again. A sister’s revenge was complete.

Meanwhile, another Spaniard was getting a tennis lesson at Rod Laver Arena. Albert Montanes may feel 32 is a little old to be getting a lesson, especially as he was competing in his 33rd Grand Slam, but the master was on the other side of the net and all he could do was try to offer Roger Federer as much opposition as possible.

The man from Barcelona didn’t disgrace himself. There were a few nice rallies and he served well enough. But the score was as inevitable as it was predictable — 6-3, 6-4, 6-4.

Gisela Dulko, the Argentine who had played so well to defeat Ana Ivanovic in the previous round, ran into a much sharper opponent in the ninth-seeded Russian Vera Zvonareva and went down 6-1, 7-5 at Margaret Court Arena while the increasingly impressive world No. 7 — Victoria Azarenka from Belarus — destroyed the Italian Tathiana Garbin 6-0, 6-2.

In the opening match of the day, Samantha Stosur gave the Aussie crowd plenty to cheer about as she moved impressively into round four with a 6-4, 6-1 defeat of the 73rd-ranked Italian Alberta Brianti. That sets up a match against Serena for Stosur who beat the world No. 1 in Los Angeles last year, just a few weeks after reaching the semifinal of the French Open.

“Knowing I’m going to be up against a great champion may take a little bit of the pressure off,” said Stosur. “I guess I really don’t have that much to lose. I know I’ve got the game that can beat her because I’ve done it before. So I can go into the match knowing that and really believing in myself.”

Injury bug bites in Melbourne

The injury plague that reared its ugly head toward the end of last year on the ATP tour came back to haunt the Australian Open on a Saturday that should have produced a feast of great tennis for a record-breaking crowd of 77,043 over two sessions.

Russia’s Mikhail Youzhny never got on court for his match against Lukasz Kubot of Poland, Stefan Koubek of Austria withdrew after losing the first set to No. 9 seed Fernando Verdasco, and then the highly anticipated evening showpiece was completely spoiled when Marcos Baghdatis found he could hardly hit a ball against Lleyton Hewitt and stopped when trailing by 6-0, 4-2. Hewitt will now play Roger Federer in the fourth round on Monday.

Two years ago, Baghdatis, a finalist here in 2006, had a lost a 4-hour, 45-minute marathon against Hewitt that finished at 4:34 in the morning. It was an epic and the packed Rod Laver Arena, mainly pro-Hewitt but with a vociferous contingent of Aussies of Greek and Cypriot origin chanting their support for Baghdatis, hoped for an encore. Instead they got a dud.

Baghdatis had staged a magnificent recovery from two sets to love down against Spain’s David Ferrer in the previous round and then felt a little pain in shoulder during practice. “But I wasn’t worried,” he said. “I’m used to pain, having a little bit of pain everywhere. But, once the match started I just couldn’t hit the forehand. I couldn’t control the ball. I was just pushing. I was feeling the pain when I wanted to hit the ball and when you do that everything goes wrong, you stop moving.”

It was clear from the first point that there was a problem and even though Baghdatis tried to continue after attention from the trainer, it quickly became clear that the match was not going to go the distance.

There was even a problem during the match on Hisense Arena between Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Tommy Haas when the German needed treatment for a back problem and received an on-court massage. But at least Haas was able to fight on before losing a 4-1 lead in the fourth set and ultimately the match 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 7-5 to the jubilant Frenchman who was runner-up here in 2008.

Last October, at the ATP Masters 1000 event in Shanghai, there were no less than nine withdrawals through injury. By the time the top eight reached the ATP Finals in London a month later, half of them were clearly carrying injuries of some sort or another. There is no single cause for this worrying attrition rate, but the fact that 36 of the 62 tournaments played on the ATP tour are played on hardcourts is a major factor.