Tennis Hall of Shame

This week on Eurosport, Chris Bradnam has been the commentator for two of Dinara Safina's matches.

Safina vs Clijsters
CB: I can't see that she has any weapons to hurt the top players.

Safina went on to win that match in straight sets, and then hammer perennial top-tenner Elena Dementieva 6-1,6-1 in the next round.
--
Safina vs Kuznetsova (after many comments from CB about what a breakthrough winning this match would be for Safina):

Nigel Sears (sharing the booth): Actually, she has won a Tier II title before, in Paris.

CB: She has?
--
Here you go, Chris: Safina's WTA record

wg
wg

Posted by wendyg at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Natasha Zvereva didn't have, I thought, a particularly unpronounceable name. And yet people managed to mangle it in the most astonishing ways. Even after she'd played at Wimbledon for ten years, Dickie Davies was still calling her "Zevereva". Quite a few people called her Zevreva. And so on.

So: the Zvereva Award to the player with the name the most commentators manage to mangle. Matevzic was probably last year's winner (or woulc have been): for some reason Eurosport kept calling her Mateyevich.

This year,even so early, it's clearly going to Anna Chakvetadze, whose name had three pronunciations yesterday on Eurosport alone. I've mercifully blanked all but Shock-ve-dot-see.

wg

Posted by wendyg at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not sure what kind of Shame Rating to give this one, since it's not really entirely clear exactly what Murray meant. But when asked on court by a reporter how he thought his match (first round at Auckland: he beat Kenneth Carlsen 7-5,6-2), he said, "We were both playing like women," of the first set, in which there were seven breaks of serve.

He could have meant they were both playing badly.

He could have meant they both served horribly and therefore failed to hold serve.

Or -- and this is the interpretation we favor -- he could have meant they were playing in spaghetti strap bathing suit dresses borrowed from Sharapova and Vaidisova.

wg

Posted by wendyg at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Serena Williams on Friday with Jonathan Ross, three days before Wimbledon started and less than a week before losing to Jill Craybas in the third round.

Ross: You're number four in the world at the moment.

SW: Am I?

Ross: You're seeded number four, I believe.

SW: You know, I don't keep up with the rankings. If I'm not number one, it's like, whatever. I consider myself the best still. I consider myself number one.

Posted by wendyg at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)