Very good win by Manisha. Pity for Katie, although really just confirming that she is relatively underranked and there should be a big upside to her ranking as she plays more tournaments quite apart from steadily becoming more experienced anyway.
So nice to see her using her excellent physique and athletic skills to actually take on the ball and play aggressively as opposed to scuttling all over the court and chipping everything back.
Sorry - for once I actually watched the end (though with no scores, I was following on bet365 and that showed the win first) and with so few tournaments on this week, I've got all the matches on one sheet (which seems to be making it easier to tweet without some of my more common errors), so it was all too easy to post.
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GB on a shirt, Davis Cup still gleaming, 79 years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming ... 29/11/2015 that dream came true!
the young French girl is taking Cadar apart - it's a shame Katie B didn't manage to come through yesterday, the romanian really doesn't have much of a game apart from a bit of leftie swing going on.
If Salas carries on, it will be an interesting semi - youngsters blow hot and cold and, if Em wins the quarter, her game will almost certainly be something that Salas is not used to. (Manisha would probably be a more 'standard' contest).
For anyone who's interested, 15 year-old Emmanuelle Salas is an interesting player as she's always been in the French spotlight (she won the U-12 national championships) but she's not really in the system.
Her parents are both tennis monitors and they own a club in the middle of nowhere in the south of France. So she's very much a product of them (her dad claims that schlepping her to all the training centres would take way too long).
She's home-schooled (by correspondence) and her dad is full-time her coach.
They put huge emphasis on the pleasure of playing and the irrelevance of ranking (but the importance of winning) i.e. that playing a tournament to get points for a ranking is completely the wrong approach but playing a tournament to win it (or to get to a certain place, depending on the level) is what the aim should be.
They also are very against young players using racquets that are way too heavy for them - which lots of girls do because it gives them a more powerful shot. (Although she's grown a bit now, it's also true that Emmanuelle was a tiny, slender little girl). And also very against over-training. They are very concerned about long-term injuries.
Salas is supported by the Sport for Life foundation, as well as sponsored by a local consultant company, as well as Tecnifibre.