PaulM wrote:

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Not a huge surprise, but still a shame for Katie. Saying on media she put too much pressure on herself when she didn't need to and got in her own head. Very dangerous to come out on court thinking "I should win this", rather than "I can win this" - especially in a Grand Slam!

But hopefully she can stay healthy, everything there for a good 2021 for her.

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 Especially when she told the BBC she wasn't going to put pressure on herself beforehand. A big missed opportunity especially after last week, how many ranking points would she have got for a win?

 

The Sun says she doesn't want to require a wildcard for Wimbledon but I don't see how she has the time/opportunity to make it any other way.

dodrade wrote:

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PaulM wrote:

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Not a huge surprise, but still a shame for Katie. Saying on media she put too much pressure on herself when she didn't need to and got in her own head. Very dangerous to come out on court thinking "I should win this", rather than "I can win this" - especially in a Grand Slam!

But hopefully she can stay healthy, everything there for a good 2021 for her.

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 Especially when she told the BBC she wasn't going to put pressure on herself beforehand. A big missed opportunity especially after last week, how many ranking points would she have got for a win?

 

The Sun says she doesn't want to require a wildcard for Wimbledon but I don't see how she has the time/opportunity to make it any other way.

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 That is the problem for anybody out of the top 200 or maybe even lower. Where to play to get up the rankings. Shame she couldn't have matched her form against Gauff and Osaka.

If tennis was based on points won ,then the score was Wang 93 Errsni 91. However the  match winner is the winner of the last point. 

I was listening to Laura and Annie K. commentating  on BBC Radio 5 live  today. At one point Laura was saying she had never sat through a  whole 5 set mens match and later on agreed with a suggestion that women play the best of 5 sets in the GS  quarter finals  onwards . This suggestion  always seems to come from ex players (Amelie Mauresmo recently) or commentators who have never played. I thought the idea was to reduce  the  time of  sports and not increase. the time. Final set tie breaks etc. Women  did play the best of 5 sets in the WTA finals from 1984 to 1998. It was  then abandoned   may be  because in 1996 Graf had knee problems and Hingis was cramping badly. Graf won in 5 sets , but won sets 6-0,6-0. I recall Laura discussing the same topIc at Wimbledon in 2014  with Marion   Bartoli who was against the idea because she felt it did not improve the quality of the tennis. I don't think Bouchard would have won  Wimbledon in 5 sets in 2014 .Same for Vondrousova  at Paris in 2019.Prolonging the match for another   set would not have done anybody any favours.

Just more or less caught up now. Largely enjoyable day. Shame for Katie, but at least she made the second set respectable, getting it back on serve, because it had looked like she would be off the court within an hour at one stage. Fantastic to see Andreescu back on court after about 16 months, she had to dig deep and was 3-3 *0-40 in the deciding set before eventually pulling away and winning another trademark three setter. Don't know how far she can go here (although a few would have said the same after only having one match between Miami and Toronto in 2019...), but it's been far too long for a player of that quality to be away from the scene.

In terms of betting odds, there were only really 3 upsets today - e.g. Potapova was a 1/2 favourite to beat the seeded Riske, as since the 2020 Aussie Open, Ali has now lost 8 of her last 9 tour matches (her only win in that period was against T Maria who was playing her one and only match since the pandemic, amid pregnancy and miscarriage talk), so Riske is one of those who are kind of benefitting from the current ranking system. Begu (after her decent showing last week) losing to Stojanovic was deemed the biggest (betting) surprise.

One thing that struck me is that this half is crazy is terms of genuine, legit contenders - Osaka, Serena, Sabalenka, Muguruza. Then the most recent slam winner in Swiatek, and the wildcard (not actual) of Andreescu. They've obviously split the seeds down the middle in terms of ranking, but it does look one of the most unbalanced draws that I can remember on the women's side for quite some time.

All the bottom half contenders have now played, bar Muguruza, so are now a step closer (and thus odds will come in), but look at the outright odds:

m.skybet.com/tennis/australian-open-women-s/event/27096524

7 of the 8 faves are in the bottom half, including Muguruza at 12s, who like the top half still has to win 7 matches, whereas high seeds in the other half include the out of form Bencic at 125/1, Svitolina at 40/1, Ka Pliskova at 33/1 despite most of the perceived bigger threats being in the other half - it couldn't have worked out much better, on paper, for home favourite Barty to make the final, although saying that, this is women's tennis and anything can happen.

Looking forward to doing it all again tomorrow, and hopefully we will have a GB win or two (or even three) to celebrate. Just the 35 women's matches on the schedule 

-- Edited by Ace Ventura on Monday 8th of February 2021 04:40:17 PM

Just going through Tuesday's order of play.

Konta 4th on Court 13
Watson 2nd on Court 10, following a men's match
Jones 4th on Court 5

Evans vs Norrie 4th on Court 8.

All those courts start at midnight UK, and all have a 2:2 men : women ratio, so a decent chance that some of the latter ones will directly clash, obviously depending on how previous matches go on the respective courts, but probably a decent chance they will be on at a more convenient time for the UK viewer to watch live.