Day 12: Talent Spotting

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Day 12: Talent Spotting

We are all blind to the future, but the business of talent spotting at a junior Grand Slam is a particularly tricky one. How on earth can you figure out who’s going to ‘make it’? A quick glance at the list of junior Grand Slam winners shines light on the difficulty of the task. For every Roger Federer there’s a Wesley Whitehouse, for every Andy Murray there’s a Vladimir Ignatic, for every Simona Halep there’s a Noppawan Lertcheewakarn. Part of the problem is that it can be too easy to get sucked in by the fact that all the juniors play such great tennis. They wouldn’t be at a Grand Slam if they didn’t.

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Day 11: Feeling The Heat

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Day 11: Feeling The Heat

Despite all the pre-tournament chatter about the new heat stress scale at this year’s Australian Open, today was actually the first time it became necessary to fully understand the workings of it. It really was an incredibly hot day. Scorching, sweltering, scalding, sizzling; none of these words can really do justice to the experience of spending any amount of time outside today, where the heat was claustrophobic, headache-inducing and inescapable, the kind to bring human life to a standstill. My coping mechanism was simply to spend as little time as possible outside.

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Day 9: New Rules, New Faces

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Day 9: New Rules, New Faces

After a couple of days without actually watching too much tennis on court, I ventured out for the evening session on Rod Laver Arena tonight, to witness a flawless performance from Petra Kvitova and Rafael Nadal. While I was out there, a couple of the unanswered questions from Q&A blog came to mind, so I answered them here. What are Australian tennis fans like? Who is the most impressive player to watch in the flesh? Also, I reveal who held the longest press conference of the tournament and who forgot the new rules.

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Day 8: Higher Stakes, Calmer Days

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Day 8: Higher Stakes, Calmer Days

We’ve reached week two, and we’ve reached a fascinating juncture in terms of the changing feel of the tournament. The on-court stakes are intensifying, but the behind-the-scenes workload is actually diminishing. Some journalists have already departed. Fewer people will enter the grounds each day. And the locker rooms will empty dramatically. This same paradox occurs at every tennis event. The matches may be more important, but there are far fewer of them, and as such the day is less hectic.

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