Tonight in Charleston, 2007 Family Circle Cup champion Jelena Jankovic became the first of six former champions to exit the tournament. 2004 champion Venus Williams, a wild card in Charleston, defeated Jankovic 7-5, 6-0. Jankovic served for the first set at 5-4 and was broken, and she was hardly able to make any kind of statement after that.
Williams, on the other hand, got better as the match went on, and broke Jankovic a total of seven times. She said afterwards that "...winning a match in straight sets is something I'm not used to yet."
Jankovic was frustrated by her own poor service game, and by the fact that her movement--historically her greatest asset--is not the same as it used to be. "I had problems, you know, moving wide, and then going back to the same side," she said. "I was, in the past, like one of the best movers on clay, and today I was falling all over the place."
Following the Williams-Jankovic match, Anabel Medina Garrigues and Yaroslava Shvedova defeated Vania King and Anastasia Rodionova 7-5, 6-3 in doubles. Also winning in doubles today were top seeds Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond, 2nd seeds Kveta Peschke and Katarina Srebotnik, and 3rd seeds Sania Mirza and Elena Vesnina. Mirza and Vesnina are the defending champions.
2 comments:
I'm really glad to see Venus playing as well as she is. I never tire of her and will be genuinely sad when she chooses to retire. End of an era and all that!
And, since I don't know her (ha!), I'm unreasonably worried that she's still biting off more than is healthy. I suppose I should trust a livelong world-class athlete who always seemed to play by her own rules to know what's best for her, but I'd rather have a healthy older stateswoman in tennis than a hurt current player.
(And now I'm just laughing at myself!)
She said last night that, going into each match, she thinks about how much energy she can save, but then she starts moving and running, and that's that. That she wants to "save a little bit in the tank," but that doesn't work out for her.
We'll see. So far, she looks strong.
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