High society did not come to Charleston. Justine Henin, Maria Sharapova, Amelie Moresmo, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Martina Hingis and last year’s winner Nadezhda Petrova refused to participate in the tournament. As a result, only the eighth racket of the world Nicole Vaidishova turned out to be the first seeded, which is unusual for the tournaments of the first category, to put it mildly. Usually such force majeure among the elite is a good opportunity to pick up points for second-tier tennis players. But in the second tier of injury, many were confused by the cards. And two helped to reach the final.
Elena Yankovich in the quarter finals could get Shahar, which is not sugar. But the Israeli bambina Peer lost the first match, because the day before, falling on a run, cut her left palm and was left without a backhand. In the semifinals, Jankovic could have had a splendid selection of two Williams sisters. I really wanted to see Serena on the ground, or even a meeting of two sisters in the third round - because the last time they played with each other as much as two years ago. But Serena injured her inguinal muscle in training and in the first match refused to play with a score of 3: 5.
Thus, there was nothing left of Yankovich’s luxurious choice, but she must not be offended by fate, after all, Venus doesn’t look as threatening as her sister this season. And the semifinal match confirmed this. Now Venus will have serious work on the errors in the literal sense of the word. For the whole match, she made 13 doubles (one of them in the second set on the setball at Yankovic) and 54 unforced errors. For some reason, it seems that precisely because of this circumstance, Jankovic had 16 breakpoints. But after all, someone made Venus nervous and mistaken. And this someone was precisely Jankovic, who came to the tournament in good shape and, before meeting with Williams, gave the rivals in three matches only 7 games.
And Dinara Safina gave way to the finals in very plain text. The quarter-final was given without a fight by Tatyana Golovin. With a score of 3: 6, Golovin, who played the ninth day in a row, withdrew from the match due to fatigue and thereby lost the opportunity to replace Nadezhda Petrova as Queen Amelia Island, Charleston and All Green Clay. Dinara, I suppose, was lucky - Tatyana was a traditionally uncomfortable opponent for her: out of four meetings, Dinara won only one.
In the semifinals, Safina planned a “comfortable” Russian derby with Vera Zvonareva. All four of their meetings were played on the ground, and Vera managed to win only once. For both, the semi-finals of the tournament of the first category are a valuable achievement, and for the sake of this semi-final Vera and Dinara even withdrew from the doubles category, and for the same reason - a wrist injury. Apparently, Zvonareva’s injury turned out to be more serious: yielding 3: 6, 1: 0, Vera, shedding tears, finally stopped tormenting herself.
It turned out that Safina and Yankovich ended up in the finals due to injuries and fatigue of rivals. But with such a composition of the participants, they could well get there themselves, so the decisive match between the second and fourth seeded was not such a big surprise.
The question of the winner of the tournament in the absence of the elite was not acute. Both with access to the finals have already risen to record highs in the ranking, and for Jankovic it was generally the first final tournament of the first category in life. No special intrigue was observed in the statistics of personal meetings either. And the odds were roughly equal. Jankovic is probably more tired after playing with Venus, but she raised her tone by this victory. Dinara has a wrist injury, but the last two matches she got almost for free.
Of course, we hoped for a victory of a compatriot. And we also hoped to see an interesting match. Dinara knows how to play reliably against any attacker, relying on other people's mistakes - remember the matches with Sharapova. Jankovic not only puts the balls close to the side, but also knows how to surprise with unexpected decisions.
But in the end, we did not get anything we wanted - the girls fought not so much with each other as with the wind. Gusts of wind blew the ball when throwing a meter and a half behind the feed and pulled towels from under the knees of the ball fights. A beautiful game did not work out - the struggle was purely for the result, because the victory in the tournament was at stake. The most annoying thing was that Dinara didn’t really succeed - “the wind, well, how are you out of place, right now, when I'm trying to win my first tournament of the first category”. So sometimes players burn nerve cells in disputes with judges. And Yankovich managed to defeat the wind. And together with this victory came very close in the ranking to Martin Hingis. This is how sometimes force majeure among the elite leads to a change in the composition of the elite itself.
Ksenia VITRYAK