Mornin', folks. Well, here we are again in a new year, and Roger Federer is in another final. The watchword or acronym is, to borrow from those old rockers The Who, "Meet the new year, same as the old year." And isn't it nice to see Nikolay Davydenko, whose history of contention was interrupted last year by injury, back to his old "hardest working man in tennis" form?
But the hero moment of the day was the performance of 31-year old Greta Arn, who beat Yanina Wickmayer to win Auckland. The most salient detail: Arn's third-round win over top-seeded but increasingly vulnerable Maria Sharapova. It was Arn's first win over a Top 20 player in her entire career, in which she's had 16 such opportunities. Not a bad way to break into the elite "I beat a Top 20 player" club. Arn is the only WTA player who officially lists her residence as Budapest, Hungary and Rome, Italy.
If you check out her activity report you might have seen this coming. Arn had battled through a multitude of qualifying events and rinky-dinky tournaments in 2010; her most impressive result was a six-match run at Wimbledon, where she beat Kateryna Bondarenko and Alicia Molik back-to-back before losing in the third-round to former Wimbledon finalist, Marion Bartoli.
On the flip side, Wickmayer had to be disappointed by the 3-6, 3-6 loss, in which she managed to contrive just two break points, which Arn dispatched with her serve. Arn has now boosted her ranking into the Top 70 category, and her record suggests that this was no fluke performance. A pro who's logged a lot of court time, is reasonably fit despite having crossed the dreaded threshold of 30 and who comes out of the gate of the new year with a unexpected win has to be considered a threat to any contender at the upcoming Australian Open. Stay tuned on this one.
Arn described her feelings, rather uninventively, as "a dream come true." But it think we ought to consider that Kimiko Date Krumm and even Francesca Schiavone and Venus Williams played a role in shaping that dream. I'm not big on the paranormal in general, but our thinking on age in the WTA, and more important, the thinking of the players, has been subtly transformed.
Things aren't quite as SATOY on the WTA side, eh?
-- Pete