Just started - live scores suggest Sam has won the first game.

err, 4 service games in a row lost, another DF! Now upto 11 in 9 games.

R1: MOORE, Tara (GBR) 242 beat MAKAROVA, Christina (USA) 1058 by 2 & 4
R1: MURRAY, Samantha (GBR) 262 lost to VRLJIC, Ana (CRO) 6 234 by 2 & 4

Tara will probably play 4th seed Julie Coin WR 208 in R2 but the former world no. 60 has to beat a qualifier on Wednesday first. Lisa is first up on Wednesday at 09.30 local = 16.30 GMT.

Another possible explanation for the 'defence' - the OoP here starts at 9.30 am local time and finishes mid-late afternoon each day, with singles matches likely to be played sometime between about 9.30 and 2. Thus for someone concentrating mainly on singles who wants to get, say, 7 hours of sleep per night and plenty of preparation time in the morning without changing their sleep schedule every day, sleeping from 7 pm-2 am each night could make sense (if I remember right, the time the 2 am tweet was brought up, the previous one was 7 hours earlier, and since checking that was bad enough, I'm not going to check again this time ) ... throw in the possibilities of a biphasic sleep pattern (a perfectly reasonable approach), disturbed sleep through constant changing of time zones or a myriad of other possible reasons, etc, and tweets at seemingly odd hours become even less odd.

Roger Federer mentioned recently (it may even have been last week) that he was getting up at mid-day each day because he was being scheduled for evening matches all the time, so rather than trying to sleep at 'normal' times on the days when he got the chance, he got into a routine of going to bed at about 4 am and getting up at mid-day so that his sleep pattern was consistent throughout the week. Obviously this is easier for Fed because he doesn't have to share accommodation with other people (I don't think he had his family with him that week), but still, it suggests it's not 'unprofessional' to sleep 'abnormal' hours if circumstances dictate.

Also, if Tara thought she was doing something wrong by staying up too late, getting up too early or whatever, she probably wouldn't be tweeting at 'odd' times - indeed, I hope for her sake that she doesn't read this thread and start feeling paranoid every time she happens to be awake at a time that might look a bit suspect.

Having said that, if any of the Brits in Surprise are reading this thread, then they're probably just ****ing themselves laughing at this apparent obsession with their sleeping and tweeting habits. They might even be tempted (if they use Tweetdeck) to schedule tweets for stupid hours just to watch our reaction ... but fortunately for what is left of our sanity, they've probably got better things to do.

Anyway, korriban might be right and I might be wrong (after all, we're both commenting based on hardly any information), but in the end, the vast majority of players, especially those who are still on their way up, must want to win matches even more than we want them to win (I know, shock horror! ), so I'm inclined to give players the benefit of any doubt.

-- Edited by steven on Wednesday 20th of February 2013 05:03:23 PM

A few too many "probably"s there for my liking korrriban, based on not really a lot of previous evidence ( I believe a match one week in a gale force wind and another to the eventual decisive champion last week ).

I said myself that she was "possibly" not a morning person, as has appeared to be the case with some players such as Andy in the past.

Or have you further researched this, so based on rather more than these two losses I referred to and this good looking win ?

But, you could easily interpret this the other way.

For example:
Perhaps she went to bed at 20:00 the night before, and this was because she had realised that with all the different time zones and perhaps not being a morning person, and taking at least 3 or so hours to warm up to best condition, the only way to prepare for another 10:00 match was to get a good early night, wake up at 05:00 and then ease in to the day - the extra time allowing her to reach her usual performance levels and negate her slow daily starts.

In which case it would be a highly professional and intelligent move showing great commitment to the cause and allowing her the best chance to win a morning match.

But, the truth, and only really important factor is: we just don't know - either way or neither!

I don't think guessing about it helps any one at all. In fact it starts one trying to scrape evidence together to fit a theoy, and that is bad science - including statistics and analysis.

Tara's doing reasonably well, getting very close to improving her CH. Let's at least wait until she's not performing before we search for possibly non-existent reasons to criticise her.