Anne plays Germany's Anne Schaefer (wr: 329) in rd1. Schaefer has made three 10K finals this year, two on clay so could be dangerous but has done little at 25K level. Did beat Stoopy in straights indoors earlier this year

Tourney website: http://www.kgtcz.be/indexgtcz1.htm

that really isnt good

Rubbish result for Anne, been very poor on clay this year. I've no idea why she's preparing for the upcoming series of tourneys on US hard by playing a 25K on red clay.

I disagree with John though, Anne is only 23 (she's been around at the top of the British game for so long), still in the top 200 and I don't think she should be considering retirement yet. True, the last 12 months have been rather grim and it seems that there are technical or mental areas of her game which badly need sorting out. These days she's so Dementieva-like on serve and it's costing her dear - if she'd been able to hold her serve more than just a handful of times she would have beaten Meng Yuan and qualified for Indian Wells, would have beaten the same opponent at the French (she certainly broke serve enough times in those two matches) and won rd1 matches at Birmingham and Eastbourne. That's a huge sack of pts she's missed out on and she needs to get to the bottom of these service games issues. Her serve has a reasonable amount of pop so she should be able to hold more often. From reports, she seems to have been plagued by unforced errors this year, she's someone who really goes for her shots, maybe she feels like she has to be dictating play on her service games and so goes for more and therefore makes more errors...I've heard of that happening with players.

Anne does tend to play tournaments week in week out, maybe she should take some time off for an extensive training block to work on her game.