It’s that time of the year…

It’s deep into Autumn in the lesser half of the globe we call “the Northern Hemisphere”. In the poetry world, they call it the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. In the tennis world, it’s the “season of injuries and missing top seeds”. Although Dootsie generally knows this time of the year as “the season of [...]

Picket Fence Picspam: the Baby Quiz

With so little tennis to inspire me, it’s time for a bit of fluff with some baby photos I’ve collected over the years of tennis players. Sorry about the size and quality of some of these, baby photos are hard to come by! 
Guess who these cuties grew up to be? Go on! You know you [...]

Worrying is a good thing.

I present to you my newly revised “Worries List”, originally posted on the 12th April 2009. Oh how things have changed!
For starters, my top 2 worries are gone. I must worry more. 
 
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Dootsie’s Top 10 Tennis-Induced Worries

I worry that Roger Federer will implode mentally,  plummet down the rankings and/or finish his career with ‘only’ 13 slams.  Slam #14 [...]

Tennis Woes: Dootsie’s Tennis Worries List

Sunday is usually ‘wrap-up’ day here at Picket Fence where I muse on the hot-or-nots of the past week. This week however, thanks to the fabulous idea of Freakyfrites from GTT, Sunday is officially ‘Worry Day’, where I shall answer the intriguing question – “What do you worry about in the Tennis World?“
 

 
So here is [...]

The Escape Artists’ Round

“Imagine if we got home to find that Nalbandian has lost the match,” a friend of mine suggested to me as we left the lecture theatre, where we spent 2 hours listening to the lecturer drone on about freedom of information legislation while watching the scoreboard post up the most impossible scoreline of 63 53 [...]

All hail the sisters!

So it wasn’t their best match against each other, but compared to the forgotten semifinal between Razzano and Kanepi, or the matches we’ve been getting all week in Dubai, it was pretty damn good, and by the end of it, it was Venus Williams that surged ahead to lead their rivalry 10-9. Despite her poor [...]

It’s Official – my hunch sucks.

David Nalbandian. I so did not get my hopes up for you. Feel my disdain.
 
Credit to Lu though, I saw a bit of him at Hopman Cup and knew this guy could be a giant killer – he took down Andy Murray last year at the Olympics too, from memory. But at the same time, [...]

Week 2 Wrap-up: The Hot-or-Not’s Down Under

Has it only been 4 months since the last slam? Feels like it’s been a year. It’s 3PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon here in Melbourne and for the first time since the start of the year, there is no tennis on TV, but there is all the restlessness of a city living through the [...]

AO Preview: Supertennis Team and More

Instead of doing some preview where I talk about the chances of every single seeded player and come to a useless conclusion, I thought I might try a different format. 
 
This Australian Open, I’m entering my local newspaper’s Super Tennis team competition. The rules are fairly standard – you choose 3 players from the top 25, [...]

2008 Year-End Wrap Up: ATP Pt 2, the Players

Some final thoughts on the players this year, by players, I mean players other than Roger Federer, who, as the header of this blog, deserves his own damn post.  :D
 
Player of the Year
Who else but Rafael Nadal. To say that Rafa has been the most dominant player this year is to state the obvious – [...]