Regardless of what the ranking computer says, after Wozniacki became the world No 1 for the first time, the injured Williams will continue to regard herself as the best female tennis player on the planet, and who would disagree with the Californian’s opinion of herself?
It was somehow appropriate, but also perhaps a touch unfortunate for Wozniacki and for women’s tennis as a whole, that her elevation came through beating an unremarkable Czech opponent, Petra Kvitova, to reach the quarter-finals of the China Open in Beijing, which is not exactly a tournament that she would have dreamt of winning while she was a young girl learning the game.
It was a workaday win at a workaday tournament for a young player who has got to the top of the rankings, not from having won one of the four grand slams, but by being consistent over the year at the regular tournaments, at the level below the majors. Williams, this year’s Australian Open and Wimbledon champion, remains the best in the world.
Wozniacki, this year’s Ponte Vedra Beach, Copenhagen, Montreal, New Haven and Tokyo champion, is the most dependable at the B-list events, when the wider sporting world is looking the other way.
No one is saying that this is her fault, but this further devalues the No 1 ranking, as she is the third woman in the past couple of years to go to the top of the leader board without having held one of the grand slam trophies, following Serbia’s Jelena Jankovic and Russia’s Dinara Safina. Every time this happens, the women’s world No 1 ranking means a little less.
Wozniacki did not even feature in a slam final this season. It would have been all the sweeter, all the neater, for Wozniacki, and for the tour, if she had won this year’s US Open, as victory in New York would have also brought her the top ranking, yet she played a disappointing match against Russia’s Vera Zvonareva in the semi-finals.
Until Wozniacki wins a slam, she will be regarded as one of the ‘inbetweeners’ of women’s tennis, one of those who stood in while Williams resolved problems with injury or motivation.
Wozniacki would not have become the No 1 if it had not been for Serena’s foot injury, which she apparently sustained after Wimbledon when she stepped on some broken glass in a restaurant in Munich.
Maybe Williams will return at this month’s season-ending tournament in Doha, maybe not. Williams has played only six tournaments all year, and half of those were slams, so the fact it has taken until October for someone to bump her down to second in the world says a lot.
This is not meant to sound uncharitable towards Wozniacki, and the 20-year-old spoke in Beijing of her joy after becoming the first Danish man or woman to reach the top of the rankings.
She plainly has the ability to win a slam, and she came close to doing so at last season’s US Open when she was the runner-up to Kim Clijsters. So it was not in Melbourne, Paris, London or New York, but on the centre court in Beijing, just after Britain’s Andy Murray had beaten Spain’s Albert Montanes in straight sets to go through to play Croatia’s Ivan Ljubicic in the quarter-finals of the men’s tournament, that Wozniacki became the world No 1.
(source:telegraph.co.uk)
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