The second in a series this week about a few of the players and themes to look for in 2012.
One thing you can say about the WTA’s rankings at the start of 2012: They’re littered with could-be’s and might-have-beens, and they’re very thin on sure things. A dominant women’s No. 1 has been hard to find for a while now, but at this point you could be forgiven if you thought that the entire list had been turned upside down. Veteran Slam winners Serena Williams and Kim Clijsters enter the new season at No. 12 and No. 13, respectively, while Caroline Wozniacki and Victoria Azarenka, two youthful, Slam-less works in progress, occupy the No. 1 and No. 3 spots.
Otherwise, as your eyes run down the names, you find a tale of rampant inconsistency that falls into roughly three categories: occasional, unconsolidated brilliance (single-Slammers Li Na, Sam Stosur, and Francesca Schiavone), terrific but not yet fully realized potential (Petra Kvitova, Sabine Lisicki, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova), and various stages of slowly receding glory (Maria Sharapova, Jelena Jankovic, Ana Ivanovic, Vera Zvonareva, and Svetlana Kuznetsova). There are also, to round out the Top 10, three appealing personalities who remain long shots at the biggest events: Agnieszka Radwanska, Marion Bartoli, and Andrea Petkovic.
In other words, ambiguity and incompleteness reign, and we continue to await the champion of the future, the woman who will succeed Serena and define the next era, the way Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf did theirs. By the end of last year, it seemed that Kvitova, with her win in Istanbul, was ready to step into that role. But after the way she disappeared following her Wimbledon win in July, she has yet to prove she can win consistently and without her best stuff.
We want a standard-bearer, right? We want stars and storylines to help us make sense of the game from week to week and Slam to Slam. The men’s tour has been better for it over the last six years, when four players have monopolized the majors and the Masters. And I would say that a committed ruling class would help the WTA as well, except that two of my favorite moments in tennis from 2011 were the two most surprising: Li Na’s and Sam Stosur’s Slam breakthroughs. The question is: How long would I continue to enjoy rags to riches to rags stories, like the one Li gave us last year? Upsets and breakthroughs and shockers taste great in the moment, but they’re the sports fans’ version of fast food. When the player can’t follow it up, they leave us feeling let down. Sustained excellence is what we, or at least I, want most from our athletes.
Who can give it to us on the women’s side in 2012? Kvitova is the obvious choice, and I think she’ll win at least one major. I’ve always loved her big game, and I was encouraged by the way she fought through the rough patches in Istanbul, something she hadn’t always done before. But the player I’d like to see begin to join Kvitova in the Top 10 and in the later rounds at Slams is Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. She can put a wallop on the ball from both sides, and she’s begun to add some texture and smarts to what was essentially a boom-boom, hit-or-miss baseline game when she joined the tour. After folding against the wilier Schiavone in Paris, she fought off the Italian in three sets at the U.S. Open. That was a small but possibly important psychological step forward for the 20-year-old, who is a former world junior No. 1. While she hasn’t quite lived up to that promise yet, and has never even appeared to be in great shape, she's still the youngest player in the Top 35.
The Russian, who is currently ranked No. 16, finished last year with a singles win in the Fed Cup final. Afterward, she wondered, in her open and funny way, why she didn’t play every match like it was Fed Cup, and she promised to try to create that kind of energy in her tour matches in the future. We’ll see: She plays her first match of the season in Brisbane today. Since chaos still reigns over the WTA, she’ll probably lose. But it’s a long season, and a fresh start for everyone. Pavlyuchenkova is no sure thing, but she’s still a might-be, and that’s as much as we can ask for at the moment.