WTA Tour Championships Starts In L.A.

The final tournament of the year on the WTA Tour started in Los Angeles on Tuesday November 8. The eight players who qualify are divided into two groups of four, play a round-robin tournament comprised of each half and the top 2 finishers play a semifinal match against the top 2 from the other group. The two groups are:

Green Group	Black Group
Lindsay Davenport	Kim Clijsters
Maria Sharapova	Amelie Mauresmo
Patty Schnyder	Mary Pierce
Nadia Petrova	Elena Dementieva

I attended the opening night with some of my friends (Thanks, Leo!) and witnessed Mary Pierce come back from being down 2-4 in the third set against Kim Clijsters to pull out the match in a third set tiebreaker 6-1, 4-6, 7-6(2). It took us awhile to get in so we missed the first set where apparently the Frenchwoman was incroyable. During the portion of the match we saw Clijsters slowly worked her way into the match, earning a break in the always-important seventh game at 3-3. Clijsters was plagued with double faults throughout the match, serving eleven total for the match and even one one her first set point. After closing out the second set she immediately broke Pierce to open the third set and rolled to a 4-2 lead. Suddenly the momentum shifted when Pierce was able to save numerous breakpoints to hold at 3-4 and she won the next two games to be on serve 5-4. In the tiebreak, Pierce was very focussed and devastating. This is a woman who saved six consecutive match points at 0-6 down in a third set tiebreak against Elena Likhovsteva on her way to winning her 18th title in Moscaow a little over three weeks ago.

The next match was Maria Sharpova's win over the crafty (and crazy) Patty Schnyder, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3. Schnyder is a dangerous opponent: she's a lefty, very fast and plays with a lot of spin. She also has a suprisingly effective serve. But Sharapova had too much firepower in the end, hitting her now familiar winners from every part of the court. Lindsay Davenport's 6-2, 7-6(1) victory over Nadia Petrova was uneventful except for Lindsay's inexplicable moodiness towards the end of the second set (at 4-4 she looked like she definitely wanted to be home already and came within two points of losing the set at 5-6, 15-30) and Nadia's inability to believe the service line judge that Davenport's serves down the tee were indeed on the line.
An exiciting start to the final WTA Tour event of the year. I hope to attend Thursday and Friday and Saturday's matches and will have more reports later in the week.