You remember Ivanovic, don't you? She won her first Grand Slam title at Roland Garros in June and it vaulted her to the top spot in the rankings. Within weeks, though, her footing up at the peak became shaky. At Wimbledon, she won just five games in a dispirited straight-set loss to Jie Cha Zheng. In Montreal, she fell in the second round. At the US Open, she narrowly avoided being the first top-seeded woman to lose in the first round in the Open era, battling back from a 3-2 deficit to win in three sets over Vera Duschevina.
Curiously, that narrow escape seemed to further damage rather than boost Ivanovic's confidence, for she lost in the next round to Julie Coin - in as artless a match as she's played all year. Afterwards, she said, "I had a very tough last couple of months. It's now behind me and, you know, I have to look at the positives."
Granted, Ivanovic had suffered a thumb injury that kept her from taking part in the Beijing Olympic Games. But the way she sprayed the ball at Flushing Meadow, committing 34 unforced errors in her three-set loss to Coin, suggested that Ivanovic's inconsistency might have had as much to do with feeling the pressure that comes from holding the top-ranking as anything else, including loss of fitness stemming from her injury. This summer, Ivanovic got a taste of what's like to live with what Pete Sampras always called "that big target on your back." It seems that more than anything else, the flavor made her nauseous.
Whether pressure, injury, or fatigue were the main culprits (in cases like this, it's often all of the above), there haven't been many positives for Ivanovic. She may have hit rock bottom early this week, in the second round of the Kremlin Cup (where she had a first-round bye), when she lost a third-set tiebreaker to Dominika Cibulkova. The result dropped Ivanovic's record since Roland Garros to a dismal 5-6. If there's a positive to take away from that, it's that she pushed the match to the limit. Players know that when they're getting to third-set tiebreakers, there's less wrong with their games than with their minds or emotions.
Meanwhile, Ivanovic's main rival for the bragging rights to Serbia has played solid if not always spectacularly good tennis, and she's in a good match-play groove. Jankovic may be tired, and she may be subject to blackouts of concentration. But she been grinding out the wins. Her second-round win at the Kremlin Cup (she also had a first-round bye) vividly demonstrated that. Jankovic, playing her first match since becoming no. 1 again, served for the first set agains Dushevina, but ended up losing it in a tiebreaker. But Jankovic kept her composure, dialed in her game, and ultimately cruised to the win.
Serena Williams isn't playing in Zurich (or Moscow); she's recovering from an ankle injury sustained in Stuttgart, where she was upset in her first match by Li Na. But her sister Venus will be seeded no. 3 in Zurich, and she could make life complicated for Jankovic or Ivanovic - or both. Venus is a wild card at this stage in the year. She isn't in the hunt for no. 1, meaning she can go out and swing from the heels and inflict the kind of damage that might enable Serena to surge at the end of the year - and end up no. 1.
Two other women with a shot at the top ranking, Elena Dementieva and Dinara Safina, are taking a pass on Zurich, and the decision could come back to haunt either one - especially if Ivanovic can find her form, or Jankovic can continue to go deep and accumulate those valuable points. The rest of the top seeds at Zurich will be battling mostly for berths in the year-end Sony-Ericsson Championships. Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska and Switzerland's Patty Schnyder are within easy striking distance, and Schnyder usually plays well before her home crowd.
But the player to watch may be resurgent Nadia Petrova. She's ranked no. 14 but playing better than she has in years; at the beginning of this week she was no. 12 in the race to qualify for the YEC in Doha.
Next week, we'll have Crisis Center posts for Madrid (surely you know that Roger Federer has entered?), but we'll be tracking and commenting on the results in Zurich as well, thanks to the closeness of the race, and the pride we feel in being a title sponsor there. Have a good weekend, everyone!
