I thought it was a fabulous tournament, largely due to the atmosphere created by the packed crowd in the evening matches. Garbine was able to stay calm and produce high quality tennis, while Anett seemed stressed. Paula and Maria both had good performances earlier in the event but didn't have enough left to make it to the final.

Yeah, fair play to Muguruza, she got better as the tournament went on and her level was very good these past few days, and nice to see her add another big title to her already excellent resume, and that obviously meant a lot to her with the location.

Those 1375 points for winning this will also be very important, and well received, because she's defending around 3000 points before the middle of March, including 1300 from the 2019 Australian Open final, but if she can peak like this week, then you'd fancy a fair few of those to be recovered.

Yeah, it's an interesting time in the WTA.

Obviously the Covid ranking freeze complicated last years year end rankings a fair bit. The likes of Kenin is still 12th, but then she still has 2,000 points on her record from January 2019. Andreescu has obviously had her injury issues, but the bulk of that 2020 ranking was collected in 2019 by winning US Open, Toronto and IW - that's 3,900 from those events alone, and she's done relatively little since then, well by those amazing standards anyway. Bertens only won 13 tour matches throughout 2020 so again, that ranking was largely dependent on her 2019 as well. Osaka has obviously had her well documented issues, Halep has struggled for fitness, and Serena just doesn't play enough and is possibly too old now to get back to those standards.

You do kind of associate the likes of Pliskova, Svitolina, and Kvitova as staple top 10 players, but only one of them has remained, so it will be interesting to see how the latter two bounce back, but Petra is 32 in a few months, so not getting any younger.

Regarding the newer crop, very few, if any, would have expected Krejcikova and Badosa to end the year in the top 8, especially when they started the year around 65 and 70 respectively, but they've both won so many matches and have a couple of very big titles between them this year, and their rise is even more admirable when you consider that they didn't really benefit at all from the frozen ranking system boosting those who did well throughout 2019 and early 2020, when both were basically non factors around that period - Badosa's biggest career points haul before the March 2020 shutdown was a mere 110 points.

Kontaveit, Sakkari, and Jabeur, all aged between 26 and 27 (well Anett will be in a month), have kind of had a few years around that 20-30 ranking range, and all have made that leap forward, while Barty, Sabalenka, Pliskova and Muguruza do feel like regular top 10ers, and Swiatek has a slam, and has backed that up relatively well these past 12 months, and is of course the youngest in the top 10 by far, so her presence feels fairly normal as well.

Assuming the tour is largely plain sailing next year in terms of events, it will be interesting to see how it is looking 12 months from now, and if the likes of Svitolina, Andreescu, Halep, and maybe Kenin can bounce back, and if the teenagers like Emma, Fernandez, Tauson can push on and threaten those positions as well.

A lot of 'depth' as widely reported, a lot of new names, a fair bit of parity amongst them, but still fairly exciting all the same.