Thought Hev had a real shout today, but not to be, nice haul of ranking points, but not enough if she wants to make real inroads up the rankings, still hopefully a nice stepping stone for the U.S. Open.
Ms Petkovic is ranked 16th. Unless Ms Watson were herself already ranked in the top 20, I don't think I'd expect her routinely to beat someone at that level. Which isn't to say that she can't beat them ... but I'm not going to be disappointed (yet) if she doesn't do it on any given occasion.
Just another of my occasional rambling tangents follows, about this event and straying into familiar old chestnut territory: can anyone explain to me why the previously quiet as a mouse Halep has now joined the ranks of WTA's most vociferous?
Even as recently as her victory in Indian Wells this year not a sound; now, she all of a sudden rivals Vika.
The argument used by the WTA for the inaction against Azarenka, Sharapova and others has always been that it was something they always did, and so would be unfair to impose upon them at this point in their careers - effectively giving them lifetime exemptions. That was always the flimsiest of pretences, as it is categorically demonstrable that Maria, especially, developed this trait several years into her Pro career - the easiest way being to watch her matches from her Wimbledon win; not a sound.
However, accepting that as given, if Halep too is now deciding to employ it, and this is the second or third event in succession in which the artificially extended effort has been heard from her, where does the future of the game lie in this regard?
Anecdotally my experience is that it turns a lot of people off, and, personally, I already watch so much tennis now with the sound off. They're never going to address it though, are they?
To draw together entirely uncorrelated things, look at the stands in Toronto this week, maybe 1/15 to 1/20 full at best so far, at a big and well established tournament in a city that only gets the WTA every other year, in the school holidays, and still no one is showing up, perhaps this is part of that reason.
And, finally it speaks to the position of tennis as a whole as a sport or entertainment. It's not as big as football, obviously, or NFL and so on, but here is something sobering that came to my attention recently: there is a computer game, called DOTA2, what it is isn't really important, you've probably never heard of it, and though a popular game of its type, it's still a small niche amongst computer games. Well, this game recently held a tournament, the International, for which the total prize fund was greater than the WTA yearly prize fund of all the standard tour level events combined (GS, Singapore and the various 'bonus pools' excluded).
If no one is attending, and the entire tour struggles to generate sponsorship equal to that of one tournament for a mid-tier computer game, what does that say about the future? How can it be sustainable, and what will the markets demand be sacrificed in order to make it more profitable in the coming years? I don't know, but I am worried.
Elena Vesnina was literally yelping in the doubles at Wimbledon and presumably her singles.
No idea if this is new(ish) or just I've managed to generally miss her, can't remember any of her matches.
I don't really like the grunting or whatever from such as Sharapova and Azarenka, but I've generally not been as put off by it as many, but I thought Vesnina something else and it had to he off putting - for her opponents !
-- Edited by indiana on Friday 14th of August 2015 08:43:11 PM
I've never really been annoyed by the shrieking/grunting/noise which might put me in the minority - I normally don't notice it after a couple of minutes and certainly never feel the need to turn off the sound on the TV. The only time it annoys me a bit is when players (mainly Maria or Serena) turn up the volume when they are behind or in a close set, but more because it seems like it is aimed at their opponent rather than being part of the stroke execution (and even then it's the intent rather than noise itself that annoys me).
The other thing that annoys me is when a studio team at a grand slam spend ages talking about it when they could actually be analysing the women's matches properly, and I think it has taken over from equal prize money as a go to generic topic around women's tennis for some fairly lazy discussion that doesn't reveal anything new. For this reason, and the fact it annoys a lot of other people, I would be quite happy if it was banned.