May 03, 2010

Tennis Canada

With a new (or recurring) men’s champion being crowned over the weekend in Rome, it’s now time for the women to take centre stage in one of the most historic cities of ancient civilization. The ladies of the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour hit the courts at the Internazionali BNL dItalia this week for one of their Premier 5 events.

The event in Rome, which is the same tier level as Rogers Cup presented by National Bank, has nine of the Top 10 women slated to play. This includes the return of world No. 1 Serena Williams who has been sidelined for the better part of the season with an injury. Same goes for defending champion Dinara Safina, who made her long-awaited return to action last week at Stuttgart.

Hometown favourites Flavia Pennetta and Francesca Schiavone are both inside the Top 15 and will be looking to create some buzz by knocking off some higher seeds to give the crowd something to cheer about.

Venus Williams, Caroline Wozniacki, Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Jelena Jankovic round out the Top 8 seeds while six more players from the Top 20 are all entered into the draw. With competition this difficult there are bound to be upsets, the first of which occurred on Monday when No. 5 seed Svetlana Kuznetsova bowed out in the second round to Maria Kirilenko.

After a strenuous Fed Cup tie which resulted in both players being injured, comeback Queens Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters will miss out on Rome. Clijsters is potentially out of action for up to six weeks with a foot injury while Henin didn’t let a broken thumb stop her from winning her first tournament since her return at Stuttgart last week.

Similar to the men, the women treat Rome as a very important warm-up event to the French Open. With only a few more weeks to go until the clay court Grand Slam, the results coming out of this week’s event should give us an indication of where thing stand for the women heading into Roland Garros.