TENNIS in DEPTH.

Australia’s tennis federation has been fined $10,000 but escaped suspension or relegation for refusing to play a Davis Cup match in India.

The International Tennis Federation says Australia will lose the hosting rights of its next home match.

Australia also will have to pay undetermined costs to the ITF and the All India Tennis Association.

The decisions were announced Friday after a conference call by the ITF’s Davis Cup committee.

Australia refused to travel to Chennai, India, for an Asia/Oceania Zone Group 1 match this month, citing security reasons.

Australia could have been kicked out of next year’s Davis Cup or dropped to a lower division.

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Seeing Steffi Graf on Centre Court at Wimbledon last Sunday, the personification of grace and charm, the backhand slice that underpinned her 22 grand-slam singles titles, the feeling struck that no one in the highest reaches of the women’s game today plays anything like her. Except one. Amélie Mauresmo.

The landscape of the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour is pitted with women voraciously chasing titles with the racket handle grasped in both hands, emitting horrid shrieks and thumping the ball to all corners to powerful but off-putting effect.

When was the last time you saw a coach put a racket into a child’s hand and not demand that they use both when attempting a backhand? Where is the novelty? The most recent ultra-dominant male players, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, have used single-handed backhands, while Alex Corretja, Andy Murray’s Spanish clay-court coach, is a single-hander and he twice reached the final of the French Open.

It would refresh the spirit to see Federer, the Swiss, and Mauresmo, from France, rising above their respective packs in a couple of weeks to lift the singles trophies at the French Open – with both hands on the plinth, of course. The acclaim for both, as people, for their styles, for their nations, for tennis, would be of a manner that had not been heard for a long time.

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Pete Sampras and Roger Federer are two of the modern era’s greatest tennis players. Between them, they have won a staggering 27 Grand Slam singles titles — and yet, neither player has ever won the French Open.

That legendary players like Sampras and Federer have somehow failed to win at Les Internationaux de France de Roland Garros is just one of the reasons why this Grand Slam tournament holds such a special place on the tennis calendar.

The French Open is notably the only Grand Slam event contested on clay — a factor that separates it from the other three majors, and more than anything else defines the tournament.

The layers of crushed brick that constitute the orange-red clay courts of Roland Garros are what brought Sampras — and still bring Federer — so much grief. Fellow greats John McEnroe, Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg also failed to win the coveted title.

The reason clay may have affected the natural games of these players is because the surface slows the ball and produces a slightly higher, loopier bounce than grass or hard courts. This means the high-power serve of someone like Sampras is negated, opening the way for players with a different style of game.

To this extent, the French Open helped create the legend of one of the finest players of all time — Swedish star Bjorn Borg. Borg won a record six times at Roland Garros. He also won five Wimbledon titles — but never managed an Australian or U.S. Open crown, both tournaments fought out on hard courts.

Describing what makes the French Open so special, Borg said: “It is toughest to win on clay. It is easily the most draining, the toughest Slam.”

“Along with that, you also need a great deal of physical strength. And most importantly, you have to believe that you can win on clay.”

It is not surprising therefore, that Spanish players — who are generally well-accustomed to playing on clay — have come to dominate the tournament in recent years. Nine of the last 12 French Open finals have featured at least one Spaniard.

The tournament is still held in high regard by France’s population. A record crowd of more than 450,000 people came to watch the action at Roland Garros in 2008, and according to the tournament organizers, it is the most-watched French event in the world.

World number one Rafael Nadal is searching for his fifth consecutive title to usurp Borg’s record of four in a row, which he currently equals. Meanwhile, world number two Roger Federer is looking to avenge three consecutive final defeats at the hands of Nadal.

In the women’s draw, the tournament appears wide open. Last year’s champion Ana Ivanovic has slipped to eighth in the world rankings, while the top four ranked players have only one French Open title between them.

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Maria Sharapova will leave Warsaw satisfied with her first singles participation for 10 months. She played better than most of her supporters could have expected after such  long absence from competitive tennis. Her shoulder didn’t give her any pain, and that in itself should be most gratifying.

In her match today against a ‘hot’ Alona Bondarenko she showed just how rusty she really is, and it would be interesting to hear her take on her performance. She is her own worst critic and I’m sure she knows exactly what she needs to do to get back to the top.

The score was 6-2, 6-2, which would suggest that it was a one-sided match. In fact she hit too many errors, most forced by the powerful ground strokes by Alona, and she looked understandable tired. It was also interesting to see that after losing her service 3 times, she reverted back to her full service motion in the third set rather than the abbreviated version she had been using in her other 2 matches.

Whether she plays in next week’s Grand Slam in Paris or decides to opt for easier events to give herself more back to back matches is still a matter for conjecture.

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Ana is on the cover of the new issue of Grazia magazine in Serbia. The high-end publication features world exclusive images from Ana’s recent shoot with renowned fashion photographer Lorenzo Agius in Dubai.

The edition also contains an exclusive interview with Ana. A translated extract is shown below:

Please tell us about the atmosphere from the fashion editorial that you made in Dubai

I enjoyed the photo shoot in Dubai. I had worked with the photographer Lorenzo before and we get on very well. The crew was also very friendly and they worked quickly and efficiently, which was great considering that we did the shoot a few days before the tournament started, so I had practice on the same day.

Do you feel better in the glamourous surrounding wearing luxurious outfits like the one made in the Dubai shooting, or in sports-style on the tennis court?

I enjoy dressing up now and then. It’s nice to do photo shoots a few times a year, or to dress up and go out to dinner or a party, because I am all day in sports clothing during practice and matches: it makes a nice change! But I feel very comfortable in my sports clothing too. adidas make some beautiful dresses, for example the blue and red ones I wore last year at the Australian and French Opens.

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Andy Murray narrowly lost today in the Guinot-Mary Cohr exhibition event to France’s Paul-Henri Mathieu, 4-6 7-6 8-10 (Champions’ tiebreak).

While the organisers of the exhibition – held at the Paris Golf and Country Club – have attempted to give it a little extra spice by splitting the twelve players involved into two ‘teams’, in effect it simply gives the contenders an opportunity to play a single match on Parisian clay, with Roland Garros due to start this coming Sunday.

Today’s contest was played out in a manner befitting a low-key practice match. In the first set, Mathieu appeared the hungrier of the two, with Murray at times appearing troubled by pain in his lower back. Play went with serve, Murray saving break points at 3-4, until Mathieu snatched the set with a break at 4-5.

Murray earned his first break point at 1-1 in the second set, but that was duly taken away from him. The games continued to go the way of the respective servers as Murray, who was beginning to look more his usual self, again squandered a break opportunity at 3-3. Serving to stay in the contest at 4-5 down, Murray had to work to save a match point, eventually steering the set into a tiebreak. That went the way of the Scot, 7-5, taking the match into a Champions’ tiebreak to decide the winner – first to ten points and ahead by two, the system used on the doubles tour. Mathieu seized an early advantage which he maintained throughout, eventually winning the tiebreak 10-8 and with it the match.

While a defeat is always hard to view positively, it should be noted that this exhibition provides nothing more than glorified practice matches for those involved. Losing narrowly ought to give Murray an idea of the areas of his game in need of last-minute fine-tuning before the infinitely more important assault on the year’s second Grand Slam, Roland Garros.

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There have been two female American champions at Roland Garros in the past 23 years; one male in 17 — Andre Agassi a decade ago. As the tennis family congregates for the second grand-slam tournament of 2009, starting on Sunday, the most obvious concentration is on a prospective showdown between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, and whether Dinara Safina, the women’s world No 1, can win her third clay-court title in succession and break her duck in the grand-slam events.

Roddick, 26, will not merit a second glance, even from the Americans. He has only just returned to the tour a married man, having spent much of April zip-lining through Costa Rica with Brooklyn Decker, his model wife of five weeks.

In seven starts at Roland Garros, the world No 6 has reached the third round once. He lasted two matches in Madrid last week, so Paris may be little more than a convenient stopover before reaching the sanctuary of London’s grass. “I have been out [on the circuit] here ten years and the schedule I had at the start of this year meant my body needed time to recoup,” he said. “It wasn’t by accident we planned the wedding for when it happened, but I am also at the middle, or perhaps closing in on, the final third of my career and you need to put your body first.”

Roddick has noted with some alarm the sprouting of players in the decade in which he has gone from an exceptional physical specimen to one who stands shoulder to shoulder with the group. “I’ve had to change my fitness programme and it almost takes precedence over the tennis part of it,” he said. “It’s much more about legs these days. I’m probably the only player in the top ten who would be considered a big server, whereas when I started there was Krajicek, Ivanisevic, Becker, Sampras. But I still love the process and I’m having more fun than ever. Whether that’s because I’m so content off court, who knows, but things could not be better.”

Asked about the prospect of an American male emulating the likes of Agassi, Jim Courier and Michael Chang, who broke a 34-year drought in 1989, he laughed under his breath. “I probably don’t see it changing,” he said. “To me there are no hard-court specialists, no grass-court specialists, but there are clay-court specialists. We are making up ground on these guys from childhood. You could get away with shot-making in Paris in the past, but not now. There is a different type of footwork required, every shot is played just that little bit differently.”

Richard Gasquet, like Roddick a client of the famed Lacoste clothing line, is also in the Lagardère team, which is rallying around the 23-year-old, who faces a two-year suspension after a positive test for cocaine, a prohibited substance.

Being inside the tennis jet set for as long as he has, Roddick recognises its various temptations. “It wasn’t tough for me,” he said. “I went to a normal school, I was socially adaptable. It is about making good decisions within the limitations placed on you.

“I knew having one night out would cost me three days, which wasn’t worth it. What you had to give up brought rewards in other ways. I am speaking from an uninformed standpoint where Richard is concerned, but I’d hate in any case to think that one bad decision could cost so much.”

Courtesy Neal Harmon The Times.

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