Dear readers, I’m glad to inform you that the Women’s Tennis Blog has been nominated for the Best Tennis Blog of 2007 at the first annual Baseline Tennis Awards. Fans around the world can pick the best players, websites, innovations, media, and highlights of the 2007 Sony Ericsson WTA Tour season.

Other blogs nominated for the Best Tennis Blog of 2007 are Peter Bodo's Tennis World, Sony Ericsson WTA Tour Player Blogs, WTA Backspin, while you can also vote for a blog that is not on the list. Just to inform you that the Best Tennis Blog of 2007 is the last category.

Voting will be closed at 12:00 AM ET on December 22, while the winners will be announced on January 1, 2008. If you want to give me a nice present for the start of the new year, vote for the Women's Tennis Blog. Thanks.

Without doubt, it’s very common these days to see flying racquets in the middle of matches. TC of the Tennis Country reflects on the fact that some players are more likely to break their racquets when angry, while some manage to channel their frustrations in good ways. Why coaches of the rising tennis pros and current professional players should pay attention to this aspect of the game?

Read more »

Here’s one good read – an article about top Sony Ericsson WTA Tour players "Taking Stock: Bottom line for the top women", that Kamakshi Tandon, assisted by Robert Waltz, wrote for the Official Site of Tennis Magazine. The article deals with world’s top eight players (Justine Henin, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic, Ana Ivanovic, Maria Sharapova, Anna Chakvetadze, Serena Williams, and Venus Williams), plus a few more.

Why it’s so valuable? Because it gives both statistical and descriptive look at the players, with additional information on how they stand compared with how they stood in 2006, and where they are headed. Also, each player was given a to-do list for the next season. For example, Ana Ivanovic should “Remember how to serve, even in Grand Slam finals”. True. (thanks to Women Who Serve who I found this through)

Men’s tennis has been hit by a series of match-fixing allegations in 2007, however, tennis legend Billie Jean King doesn’t believe that the phenomenon exists in women’s tennis mainly because there is much less money in women’s game.

Asked if she had heard of any women players who had been offered money to throw a match, the American said: "Absolutely not, not even one."

"Men make more money so maybe they (the match-fixers) go there first. People follow the money in sports. In the '60s nobody cared because there wasn't any money."

Still, the 63-year-old King is aware of the fact that players can get involved in these illegal actions if they want to.

"No one is ever immune. You can fix anything in sport if you want. You definitely could do it and that's why we have to have honor and integrity," she said.

Current world number one Justine Henin has also never witnessed any activities related to match-fixing, but declared that she would give life bans to those caught cheating. (source: Guardian, photo: Wikipedia)

Woohoo, my website works again! You may have noticed something strange going on with Women’s Tennis Blog in the past two days. Well, I experienced a problem with my hosting provider, to be precise, they lost, or deleted, all of my content from October 30th onwards! Yeah, that can happen! And I didn’t have a proper backup (the one I had didn’t work – also not my fault). Therefore, I had to find texts from my deleted posts and insert them and edit them manually one by one. This was not a pleasant experience, but I’ve consoled myself with a saying “it can always be worse”.

I know you’re not here to read about my boring problems, but I had to explain the situation. Anyway, I will continue posting from tomorrow. See ya.