TENNIS US OPEN:THERE MAY have been a few more nerves than normal but otherwise it was just like 2005 for Kim Clijsters yesterday as she announced her return to grand slam tennis in convincing fashion at the US Open.
Four years after her lone grand slam triumph and more than two years since she hung up her racket to start a family, the Belgian crushed the hapless Viktoriya Kutuzova of Ukraine 6-1 6-1 in as one-sided a first-round match as you can get.
It took only 58 minutes for the 26-year-old to take her place in the second round and as she showed in her comeback events in Cincinnati and Toronto last month, it seems as if she has never been away.
Kutuzova must have been cursing the luck of the draw after finding herself alongside the former world number one and her worst fears were soon realised.
Marion Bartoli, the 14th seed, is her next opponent but the Frenchwoman, a former Wimbledon runner-up, should hold no fear for Clijsters after the Belgian thrashed her when the two met in her first match back in Cincinnati. Already minds are casting forward to a potential fourth-round encounter with third seed Venus Williams. “I was a little more nervous than usual,” Clijsters said. “It’s a very special court to me but I really enjoyed it. I felt really good out there.”
Clijsters’ groundstrokes are as crisp as ever and her serve, despite a few double faults in the third game of the match, was much improved on her performances in Cincinnati and Toronto, where she reached back-to-back quarter-finals. It was hard not to feel sorry for Kutuzova, who pulled the short straw and was quickly buried in the cavernous Arthur Ashe Stadium. As the former world number one Martina Navratilova said, imagining that she was still playing herself: “If I’d had any influence over the seeding committee, then I’d have begged them: ‘Please, please, please seed Kim. I don’t want to play her in the first round’.”
Navratilova said Clijsters is already playing at top-10 level and that is perhaps not the biggest surprise when you think that she won the 2005 US Open, reached the top of the world rankings on three occasions and also made it to four grand slam finals.
Once she decided to return – after a call from Wimbledon in January asking if she would like to play in an exhibition event to test the new roof over Centre Court – she put herself through an intense fitness programme, determined to be fully fit before stepping back into the competition spotlight. She is no also-ran and has no intention of becoming one.
“Physically and tennis-wise I’ve done everything possible to get back into shape,” Clijsters, whose daughter was born in February last year, said. “I’ve worked really hard to get there. I know when I am out there, whether it’s five-all in the third set or something, that’s not going to be an issue. But where I was the most surprised is how comfortable I felt out there from the beginning.”
The defending champion, Serena Williams, is in the same half of the draw and said she feels Clijsters is the same player she was in 2005 when she beat France’s Mary Pierce in the final here.
The Belgian said she still had to get more consistency from her serve, but is on track to get back to where she was, competing for grand slam titles.˜ “I still feel like I can improve,” she said. “But I’m definitely comfortable where I am right now and I think it’s always a matter of just trying to work on those little things and assessing every match that I play, looking at how did I feel out there, where do I feel like I can improve. The biggest key is playing those tough matches and seeing when it becomes close and how I react in those kind of situations.”
Roger Federer got his bid for a sixth consecutive US Open title up and running in convincing fashion with a straight-sets victory over US teenager Devin Britton.
The world number one from Switzerland, looking to add to his French Open and Wimbledon titles in 2009, ran out a comfortable 6-1 6-3 7-5 winner over the 18-year-old wild card at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
- Guardian Service
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