It’s hard to not feel bad for the girl. Remember when she was number 1? We felt bad for her then. Now? Her ranking is in total free fall.
If there was ever a time for things to be on the up, it would be now. Slowly, the nagging Doha injury all the way from last year is finally subsiding, and Dinara is able to put it in solid practices and go all out in matches.
I saw her opening match against Petko, which she won, and snooped in on several practices the past couple of days. Each time she’s going full tilt, grunting and ripping the cover off the ball. Today she was hammering cross court backhands off short balls, as a drill, and it was pretty clear to me that very few players on the tour hit as hard as Ms. Safina.
Up next is a tough, tough match against Nads (which I will most definitely be at) but after that, her draw is pretty forgiving. I’m not expecting a win, but we’ll get to see how far along the recovery road Dinara is tomorrow. I’ll make sure to have a post dedicated to that match, should be a good one.
Glad to hear that she’s going all out in practice. Caught a couple of her practices at Stanford myself and she was just starting to ramp it up. So much so that the officials two courts down, where an official match was taking place asked her to keep it down! So funny. Took a picture of her reaction to this and will send it to you upon request if you’d like. Really looking forward to your tweets during this match. TennisTV.com won’t be streaming this one, and as a Dinara die-hard I’ll be relegated to watching the scoreboard. Have enjoyed all your tweets thus far, thanks again
Colleen
I think Dinara can win against Petrova, Nad’s has not been doing too much lately and I think Dinara is going to have a good shot at winning the match. But we will see what happens
)
BTW I don’t think I have ever told you but I love the blog! I have been reading for ages
Aww, thank you so much
Always appreciate the love.
It is so good to see her back, and feeling a lot more comfortable on the court, because all during clay season she was looking like anything but that.
The thing I really hope for her, apart from a healthy spine, is some momentum into next year and at least a few nce draws next year, the girl has nearly nothing to defend for most of the year.
But you can’t help but feel for her, she has so much desire, oh and Colleen, that photo sounds great, I can imagine the look already
Well I posted a Twitpic of the aforementioned Dinara picture, where she is telling Dani that they just “shushed” her. She was so incredulous! Then she turned and told her trainer and then her coach, giggling and laughing and doing the Russian shrug & frown move! My Twitter id is @ColleenGo if u want to check out the picture. It’s cute.