Australian Open:
The Russians are coming ! Again !
I think that today is the most interesting day of the championships so far and a chance to really learn a lot for the future and I will be taking special interest in the games involving Daria Kasatkina, Elizaveta Kulichkova and Margarita Gasparyan, I will only be discussing one from a betting angle, but that doesn't make the other two any less important and we clearly have the next wave of Russian stars ready to launch themselves in the next year or two............maybe sooner !
Anyway, two matches to discuss and they involve players we have already talked about and I would suggest the best place to start would be by quickly scanning through those notes, which are reproduced at the foot of this email.
Serena Williams- Daria Kasatkina
Serena saw off her (second round) opponent with great ease and in double quick time, but I am certain she will face sterner opposition today and regardless of what happens this week, I am sure that we will be hearing an awful lot more about Daria Kasatkina, who looks the real deal. Kasatkina is only 18 yo, but has been pestering the life out of her coach and team to let her turn pro for a couple of years and when she started to see what Belinda Benic was doing, she could not wait any longer. After winning Junior Roland Garros last year, she entered the US Open and won five matches, winning through qualifying and into the last 32, this is now her second ever slam event and it is clear they hold few fears for her. In the interim, she has already got her ranking up to #69 by winning six matches in Moscow and beating Venus Williams in Auckland a couple of weeks ago, after dropping the first set on a tie break, which tells you much about her battling qualities and she is not going to wilt like most other 18 yo newcomers would on this stage, playing an all time great.
( I suspect) Dasha thinks she is better than Benic, she might not say so in as many words, but it is clear from interviews that this is a confident young woman: “I was a little bit upset when Bencic started to play earlier and she started to beat other players and showing results a little bit earlier than me."When she started to play with the pros, I was still playing juniors and I was talking with my coach telling him ‘I want to play pro, I want to start to play pro, why am I still playing juniors (?) and he told me like ‘Dasha, be cool, you just have to get some experience from everywhere and really, the experience from juniors, it was great. "A lot of experience and good memories, I don’t regret it.” Benic is obviously a "fan" and said that "Kasatkina has a very different game, she plays smarter than the other players.”
Win, lose or draw, seven games is too much and I suspect more than me , that Dasha will be shocked herself if the match is not closer than that and with many opponents already having lost to Williams before they step onto court, that self belief and positive mental attitude is HUGE.
1.75 units Daria Kasatkina +7 games 2.0 Pinnacle Sports/ Sportmarket Pro.
Good Luck.
Australian Open Tennis: (written January 19th)
Tennis will feature heavily over the next 12 days or so, but as usually we will start cautiously. We all know that it is dangerous to write the Williams sisters off, normal rules have never applied to them, but we have done INCREDIBLY well in opposing Serena in slams when the time is right (usually in early rounds) and I do think that last year was a bit of a swansong and the failure to get that 2015 calendar slam at the US Open will have taken a big toll. She failed at her home championship where she had won the previously three years , after winning here in Melbourne for the first time since 2010, Roland Garros for only the second time since 2002 and Wimbledon for the first time in three years, the odds on it all coming together again, with Williams the younger turning 35 this year are slim and she knows that. Serena is probably the greatest player of all time, she and her sister could have been Olympic track stars (times were good enough) and are both fantastic athletes and i do not doubt that if you had stuck a basketball, soft ball, golf club in their hands, they could probably have made a good living out of any of them, but at this level in her chosen sport she has to be on borrowed time and that loss in New York was just crushing. She is not as fit coming into this season and has not played a competive match since losing to Roberta Vinci on that fateful day last Fall, until this week, when she edged past Camila Giori 6-4, 7-5, the Italian double faulted three games ( 12 points) and took Serena to within four and given that we know the world #1 is always most vulnerable early in tournaments, before she builds up a head of steam, we have to look to take her on whenever possible this week, given how little tennis she has played.
