Week 51 - ITF ($50K) - Ankara, Turkey Hard

Peter too · Tennis legend

Week 51 - ITF ($50K) - Ankara, Turkey Hard

paulisi · Tennis legend

Tara won the first set 6-3

Coup Droit · Tennis legend

And tara's lost the second set 5-7 . . .

paulisi · Tennis legend

Tara 5-3 up in final set.

steven · Tennis legend

Tara breaks to lead *5-3 in the 3rd

- can she serve it out? (she has won 9 of her 14 service games so far)

steven · Tennis legend

0-15 and now either one of the players is injured or the scoreboard has died

steven · Tennis legend

The scoreboard has finally come back to life, only showing one more game played though (maybe there was a short rain delay or something), and sadly Ivakhnenko broke back

6-3 5-7 5-4*

steven · Tennis legend

Whatever the cause of the delay at *5-3 0-15, there's now another one at 5-4* 0-0

steven · Tennis legend

Er, now the scoreboard is back again showing Ivakhnenko *5-4 and match point up - er?!

... and sadly, if it is now to be believed:

QR1: (q3) Tara Moore WR 305 lost to Valentyna Ivakhnenko (RUS) WR 436 (CH 217 in 2013) by 3-6 7-5 6-4

Tara was a quarter-finalist here last year and Naomi a semi-finalist, so both have significant points to come off on Monday week

scottie1 · Futures level

Surprised Tara not finished for season not great this year and this result confirms it

paulisi · Tennis legend

She is still down for HK over new year.

She has really struggled since the shoulder surgery.

PockyTastic · Futures level

I see Vera Zvonareva is also down for that Hong Kong 10K - one to avoid in the main draw.

indiana · Tennis legend

Tara was rather close to Vera at Wimbledon, 9-7 to Vera in the final set ! OK, not the true Vera, but I would certainly think it won't he in Hong Kong, so a chance for an element of revenge.

The pity is, rather like Naomi Broady, Tara has hardly won a match since Wimbledon. She is capable of so much more than she has been delivering, for whatever reasons.

steven · Tennis legend

indiana wrote:
Tara was rather close to Vera at Wimbledon, 9-7 to Vera in the final set ! OK, not the true Vera, but I would certainly think it won't he in Hong Kong, so a chance for an element of revenge.

The pity is, rather like Naomi Broady, Tara has hardly won a match since Wimbledon. She is capable of so much more than she has been delivering, for whatever reasons.

Tara picked up 99 points this year up to and including Wimbledon but just 24 points since (up to Wimbledon is more than half the season, obviously, so you wouldn't expect it to be 50:50 and even 2:1 might make sense if the player did particularly well on grass, but the ratio is more than 4:1) - still, that pales into comparison with the ratio of more than 11:1 for Naomi - 293 points up to and including Wimbledon and just 26 since.

Clearly the shoulder problem has had a big effect on Tara but with Naomi, it's not quite so clear what happened. It may well be to Naomi herself, of course - there are bound to be plenty of things we aren't aware of.

Even for Heather, the ratio is nearly 4:1 (835 c.f. 219) and for JoKo, just over 3:1 (288 c.f. 94), which could mean some precipitous further falls down the rankings in the first half of next year unless they find their form from the early part of this year again.

Conversely, of course, they will have chances to move up the rankings quickly in the second half of 2015 - let's just hope they haven't fallen too far before that.

Mervatron · Masters Series Champion

Oh Tara.

2014 a year to forget