Clijsters, Safina a world apart

MELBOURNE, Australia

Two former world No. 1s met in the first round of the Australian Open and one of them won 6-0, 6-0. It’s not supposed to be like that. Kim Clijsters played a fine match but Dinara Safina didn’t play at all. And she doesn’t have a clue why.

“I don’t know,” Safina said, bewildered. “I didn’t know how to win a point. I was sitting at changeover and I was like, 'OK, at least how can I get a chance to hurt her?' There was nothing I could do to hurt her. Embarrassing.”

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Oh, oh, oh, Dinara. Maybe if Tom Jones sang her a song she would feel better. But from the look on her face, I doubt it. She wants answers and she doesn’t know where to look.

“It’s not that I don’t want,” she insisted. “I want. There’s no doubt about that. It’s really to scratch the head and to think what the hell I’m doing. But I have to find the answers how I can come back. Definitely it hurts. First to find the reason what’s going on, what are the mistakes. I have been doing two months of preseason. I’m fully motivated. I practiced hard. But sometimes it makes no sense. Not to go blindly on court kicking your ass for five hours doing the wrong thing.”

It really doesn’t make sense, because Safina did not get to No. 1 in the world by luck and she looks in far better shape physically than she did in 2009, when she was reached Grand Slam finals here and at Roland Garros. But according to Clijsters, Safina doesn’t hit the ball as hard now.

“She just doesn’t have that same power as she used to have,” Clijsters said. “She used to have one of the best backhands down the line in the game, but she doesn’t use it much anymore. I think obviously it’s a big matter of confidence.”

Clijsters knows what its like to lose in embarrassing fashion in Melbourne -- she went down 6-0, 6-1 to Nadia Petrova in the third round here last year. “I just tried to leave it behind me,” she said. “But I was at a different stage, as well. She’s been struggling with her game for a while so it can have a different impact on her than it did on me last year. But I know her well. We were talking in the locker room afterwards. She’s a good girl like that. It’s not like she’s not going to talk to me for the next two months when I see her down the road.”

Putting aside Safina’s troubles, this was a great win for Clijsters. She hit the ball clean and crisp and Safina would have had to play at a completely different level to beat her. The Belgian is emerging as many people’s favorite for the title and with good reason. She has been a semifinalist here four times and a finalist in 2004. Plus the surface is not that different from Flushing Meadows, where she has won three U.S. Open crowns.

“I have always lost to good players here and maybe I didn’t play my best when it was most needed,” she said. “I do feel this is definitely a surface and a court I like. I see each Grand Slam as an opportunity to improve.”

There was another former No. 1 who lost here Tuesday evening. Ana Ivanovic went down 3-6, 6-4, 10-8 to Ekaterina Makarova in a back-and-forth match. Ivanovic saved six match points before succumbing to her Russian opponent who kept coming back at her with sweeping forehand cross courts to terminate rallies which pushed both players’ energy levels to their limits.

Ivanovic, in fact, blamed a pulled stomach muscle for not allowing her the build-up work she had wanted prior to the tournament. “I was really fighting hard,” she said. “But what really got to me, I think, was fitness. I was just not able to stay with her longer in the rallies. That was really disappointing.”

But the rallies were brutal and some of the tennis brilliant. Makarova gave a more than ample demonstration of how she had been able to beat five top 20 players on her way to winning the WTA title at Eastbourne in England the week before Wimbledon last year, taking the best of what Ivanovic had to throw at her and returning it with interest.

“She was really aggressive today and I felt she was getting into a rhythm more and more as the match went on,” said Ivanovic. "If she loses in the next round, I’ll be really upset!”