My serves consistent now

A tough but reasonable first fortnight of the US spring season for me, as I reached the third round of the Tier I Pacific Life Open in singles and lost in the quarter finals of the doubles.

A tough but reasonable first fortnight of the US spring season for me, as I reached the third round of the Tier I Pacific Life Open in singles and lost in the quarter finals of the doubles. My singles match against the two-time Grand Slam finalist and world No. 8, Elena Dementieva was memorable, and though I just failed to notch up the third top-10 upset of my career, it gave me some satisfaction and I hope that my time will come!

The centre court, on which we played the match, is the second largest stadium in the world after the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows, and has a capacity of over 17,000. This only added to the aura of the occasion. Elena is known to make a lot of double faults, but she is a very difficult player to compete against. And this only justifies her top-10 standing. She has the best ground strokes that I have ever faced and she is brutally fit. Though she served a handful of double faults, when the service falls correctly, it is not easy to read or master. She can hit some big ones and on the second serve as well.

For me, the biggest plus from the match was my consistency of serve 8212; a facet of my game that I have been working diligently on for the last few months. I had a 70 percent first serve success in the match and did not serve a single double fault over three sets. The match could have gone either way, but Elena ended up the winner.

The second round against Bethanie Mattek who is a year senior to me was never going to be a pushover and it wasn8217;t! At this level of the game, wins are never easy to come by and Mattek is someone who dominated international junior tennis and is just beginning to emerge on the professional stage.

I started off in great touch, serving flawlessly and stroking beautifully to easily pocket the first set. Mattek came back strongly in the second, as her big serve of around 123 mph started to hit the lines, making life difficult for me. Considering that most men serve around 115 mph, it was quite an experience to face the thunderbolts from the American girl, who was perhaps, lifted by the encouragement from the partisan crowds. I had to raise my game several notches in the decider to tilt the match my way.

It was, however, in the doubles that Ai Sugiyama and I notched up a famous victory in the second round. We beat the reigning Wimbledon doubles champions, Cara Black and her partner, Rennae Stubbs. The score of 6-7 8-10, 6-2, 7-6 10-8 is a fair reflection of the excitement of top level doubles tennis and fluctuating fortunes that lasted over two and-a-half hours. Black and Stubbs are doubles specialists and have both been No. 1 in the world. This was definitely the greatest doubles win of my career and I am a little shocked that this match was wrongly reported in certain sections of the Indian media as a loss for me and Sugiyama!

PMG/Globosport