football, hockey, tennis
Not sure if you noticed, but Bianca (Vanessa) Andreescu has lost only a single (singles) match (she hasn’t really played any doubles) since… the Australian Open! That’s pretty unheard of, especially in the competitiveness of today’s women’s tennis:
Continue reading “Even more ‘Little known facts’ on tennis”
Cincinnati, Sunday, August 19th, 2018. Final of the WTA Premier 5 Western & Southern Open (a.k.a. Cincinnati Masters) pitted the Romanian Simona Halep, the World no. 1 everything had been going great for in the past year, and the Dutch Kiki Bertens.
Halep was leading 6-2 and had a matchpoint in the tie-break of the next set at 6-5. She did not convert and quickly lost the tie-break. With it, the second set. And then the subsequent third set in a fairly straightforward manner, losing her first three serves.
Continue reading “Whatever happened to Simona Halep?”To explain the title, I will simply cite wikipedia entry on professional tennis player Tennys Sandgren:
Born and raised in Gallatin, Tennessee, Tennys went on to play two years of college tennis at the University of Tennessee.
Wikipedia
Off my chest. Yay!
Continue reading “Yet more ‘Little known facts’ on Tennys”Enter men’s singles of the 2014 Kremlin Cup. The final was between Marin Čilić of Croatia and Spaniard Roberto Bautista Agut. The result? 6-4 6-4 in favor of the Croat. A year later is when the coincidences start. 2015 Kremlin Cup again, men’s singles, and the final is… you guessed it, Marin Čilić vs. Roberto Bautista Agut. The winner is – Marin Čilić, and the score is vaguely familiar 6-4 6-4. A perfectly orchestrated performance.
Take this one, now, quite a recent one: 2016 Dubai WTA tournament. In the women’s singles’ draw, every single seeded player has lost her first match. That means, every single seed left the tournament as early as possible (be it a 1st round or a 2nd round, since some higher seeds received bye to start in the 2nd round). That’s quite a feat! One of these seeds, Belinda Bencic, became the antiwinner. Now, the antiwinner is the player that loses to the player that loses, in the next round, to the player that, then, goes on to lose to the player… and so on. You get the picture. There can be only one antiwinner per tournament and I will write a bit more on that topic in one of the next posts.
Continue reading “More ‘Little known facts’ on tennis”Julien Bennetau (FRA) is considered one of the best tennis players… that has never won an ATP tournament. Thus says Wikipedia. Well I don’t know about that but he certainly is one of the unluckiest. To lose ten finals in a row you’d think you’re jinxed or what…
Speaking of unlikely records, there is one very interesting tennis set of note. Yaroslava Shvedova (KAZ) led Amy Frazier (USA) 5-0, 40-0 in the first set and she was on serve. Up until that point she had won every single ball in that set. She had won impossible 23 out of 23 points played by that fateful moment. In other words, she had won every single game 40-0.
Continue reading “On golden sets”In 1976 the quarter-final stage featured exclusively Australians. That’s eight Australians in the final stages, and no-one else! It also marks the last time the Australian Open has been won by an… Australian!
Incidentally (as of 2015) this very same guy remains the lowest-ranked player ever (he was, like, 212th in the world at the time) to win a Grand Slam!
Continue reading “Little known facts about Australian Open in Open Era”It seems there will always be a debate about this subject. There is only one way to end this – Roger has to win Olympic tournament singles and capture calendar Grand Slam (now his next possibility is 2013). I’d love to see that happen – but all I can do is sit back, relax and enjoy tennis until at least 2016 – The Summer Olympic Games in Rio.
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