Jankovic bites the dust, Schnyder advances

Zi Yan of China will play the Swiss World No. 12 in the semifinals

BANGALORE: Top seed Jelena Jankovic failed to come out of the trough her game seems to have hit and crashed out of the $600,000 Canara Bank Bangalore Open on Friday.

The 3-6 6-3 3-6 loss to Zi Yan saw Jankovic unable to get her rhythm going and fail to string together her strokes while Yan was very much the dynamo who ran down anything that the world number four could throw across.

Yan missed three match-points before converting. Ahead 5-2 with Jankovic serving, Yan was awarded the match by an errant linesman who called a decidedly in ball out. The chair umpire was quick to overrule but surely the call would have left Yan unsettled. The quiet Chinese, who hardly makes a sound on court, recovered shockingly well even though she failed to break Jankovic’s serve. There was no sign of nerves as she proceeded to earn two match-points, serving quickly to a 40-15 lead. A Jankovic backhand sailing long gave her the match.“I committed a lot of errors. The options and chances were there but I failed to take them. She played solid while I kept making mistakes,” said Jankovic after the match. The Serb is quite the role model that can be aped by the next generation of players as she keeps smiling even in the face of a loss. Most post-match press interactions with players who have lost are grumpy affairs but Jankovic stayed her smiling garrulous self.

Yan had upset the hard-hitting eighth seed Mary Kirilenko in the first round and the Chinese, who would prefer an Olympic gold over even a Grand Slam title, is definitely on a roll. Earlier, as if the bounce was not enough of a problem for the roundhouse forehand of Patty Schnyder, the wind decided to come and flirt with the ball every now and then. Then, there were those truant leaves — the ones which would flit over the stands to jig around court — adding just another irritant to a situation that was decidedly getting prickly for Schnyder. At 83 on the rankings, Akgul Amanmuradova should have been this “she did well to get so far” kind of an outing for the world number 12. The 4-6 6-4 7-6(1) two-and-a-half hours of struggle, Schnyder had little cause to be dismissive.

The 23-year-old Uzbek had given the Swiss a tough enough time to have her call for her coach twice during the match. The seven aces by Amanmuradova are not indicative of the trouble her serve was for the Swiss. The swirling conditions only made it worse.

That Venus Williams is getting better with each match was obvious as she raced to a 5-1 lead against Vera Zvonareva. That she is still rusty at closing out matches after her layoff and is struggling with that serve was evident as she was broken twice to allow the Russian back in the match. But this being women’s tennis the service is not the authoritative thump that most men ranked 21 in the world would have. Zvonaraeva promptly conceded a break to allow Williams the first 6-4.

The American would break twice in quick succession in the beginning of the third, got broken once in exchange, and then proceed to serve out the set and the match 6-3. Anastasia Rodionova, like Amanmuradova, had never made it this far in an event of this stature. But unlike the Uzbek, the Russian seemed to be out of sorts on the big stage. She was nowhere in sync with her game or Serena Williams’ pace in the first set. She would put up a bit of a fight in the second but the 6-1 6-4 verdict hardly says enough about the domineering form that the younger Williams was in. The win set up the 15th career meeting between the two sisters who are split seven apiece till now.