Never-ending end

You would think the season-ending finale for the top eight players, the WTA Championships in Istanbul, is the way to end the year with a bang. You would be wrong. The year-end Championships is followed by the Tournament of Champions ‒ in the tennis backwater of Sofia, Bulgaria ‒ for players (the Champions of the title) who didn’t qualify for the Championships. The WTA calendar blocked out eight-ten weeks of off-season, but belatedly added lower-level events in Taipei and India. During the off-season. A messy and confusing end to the year.

Venus Williams Venus Williams

For all the women’s issues, there’s also hypocrisy at play. Not so long ago, women’s tennis was derided for being predictable and lacking in depth – “Steffi and the Seven Dwarfs” cracked Martina Navratilova – but the men are lauded for their predictability; the Big Four takes its semi-final slots as if set in cement, and that’s a good thing ...

Women players were once dismissed as powder-puffs and moonballers who couldn’t muscle the ball away. Now that the game is grunt-physical enough to make an SAS commando dry-retch, critics lament the loss of variety and touch.

After years of headline rivalries, the women’s game is in a turbulent, transitional phase, while the men bask in an era of excellence. The Dunlop Volley is on the other foot. At the tail-end of the Pete Sampras-Andre Agassi era, it was the men who were in flux, with No.1s including Thomas Muster, Marcelo Rios, Carlos Moya, Marat Safin, Juan Carlos Ferrero and our own Pat Rafter for one week. From 2000-03, the 16 Grand Slam titles were divvied up by 11 men. No man would ever dominate the game again, it was believed. Parity was the new normal. A decade on, that changed paradigm has become reality not in the men’s game, but the women’s.

Yet, if women’s tennis is not basking in a belle epoque to compare with the men, tennis is still clearly the No.1 women’s sport ‒ tougher, more telegenic and more global than ever. The women of tennis will take up their positions on the baseline and no doubt play out another saga at this year’s Australian Open ‒ just not the plotlines we were expecting.