Interesting article in an Australian newspaper today:

Women net top money from a little tennis

WELL, thank you Martina Hingis for coming back and showing us everything there is to know about women's tennis.

First, by not picking up a racquet for almost three years and then cruising straight into a Grand Slam quarter-final, and second, by losing that quarter-final quickly so we could all get back to talking about the men's draw.

OK, OK, put down those spray-cans of mace – I am being facetious.

I am a great admirer of Hingis and everything she achieved before injury and the arrival of the Williams sisters forced her into premature retirement.

But in all honesty, does her recent success in Melbourne say more about her or about the standard of the players she faced along the way?

And more to the point, given the performance of the women throughout the tournament, how can they, in all conscience, accept equal prizemoney with the men?

I have long felt there are only 10 players in the women's ranks who can give each other a decent match.

Now I must admit I was wrong. There are only eight.

With the Williams sisters now obviously too rich and too bored to get it together for a tournament out of their time zone, and Alicia Molik struggling to walk a straight line, the door was wide open.

All Martina had to do was scamper through – as long as she was prepared to raise a slight sweat doing it. Note: the emphasis there is on "slight".

Admittedly, in losing her quarter-final to Kim Clijsters on Wednesday, Hingis was forced to venture where few female tennis players have been before – a third set – but even then the match lasted just 102 minutes.

Given that the men's match on the same day between Nicolas Kiefer and Sebastien Grosjean went for five sets and the best part of five gruelling hours, Martina and Kim got off lightly.

Not as lightly as fellow quarter-finalists Amelia Mauresmo and Patty Schnyder, mind you. The arm-wrestle between the No. 3 and No. 7 seeds was all over in 52 minutes.

To put that in perspective, Kiefer and Grosjean played three sets which individually went longer than the entire Schnyder-Mauresmo match.

At 96 minutes, the men's final set was 44 minutes longer than the women's match. The girls' longest set took all of 28 minutes.

And when both matches were over, losers Grosjean and Schnyder headed to the airport with exactly the same amount for their troubles – $152,500.

The women, or more specifically their agents, have long argued that they deserve equal pay based on the undeniable fact that . . . well, they just deserve it, that's all.

So what if women only play best-of-three sets while men play best of five? So what, too, that the chasm between the haves and have-nots of women's tennis is so great that the majority of matches rarely go longer than 6-1, 6-1.

The fact is that in some cases, like that of Maria Sharapova, the women are beautiful and look great in short skirts.

Young girls want to look like them and young men want to look at them.

Tennis ability is an advantage but certainly not compulsory. Just look at Anna Kournikova. And look and look and look.

Sharapova, who looks like Kournikova but plays like Navratilova, was recently named one of the most influential women aged under 25 on the planet, along with such potential world leaders as Lindsay Lohan.

So many other stunning looking young girls with similar sounding names are emerging on the pro tennis circuit that it seems they are being manufactured in a disused nuclear power plant in Latvia, but TV and marketing executives aren't concerned where they are coming from, just that they keep on coming.

Their matches attract TV viewers, viewers attract advertisers, and advertisers attract networks who pay a lot of money for telecast rights.

And that gives the women power to ask for all the money they want.

And who is going to tell them they can't have it? Certainly not Sebastien Grosjean. He just cops it sweet and accepts his cheque.

Given that Grosjean was on court for just over 13 hours during the tournament, that cheque represented a pay rate of $11,730 an hour.

His "opposite number" in the female draw, Schnyder, was punching the time clock at the hourly rate of $27,727.

And what of Hingis, who returned from the wilderness just to see how she might fare against the new breed of tennis stars who had climbed up the ranks while she was away?

Well, in making it into the fifth round, she played matches which lasted 56, 52, 66, 92 and 102 minutes.

She played a total of 11 sets and was taken past 6-2 on just four occasions.

Like Grosjean and Schnyder, her share of the singles prize pool was $152,500, earned at a rate of $23,461 an hour.

Nice work if you can get it.