Daniela is still incredibly mentally frail. Failed to convert a BP at 2-1* and then didn't win another game. Still I think its asking a lot for Daniela to come back from the trauma of the wretched 2008 season and play with confidence and verve again,it will take time to recover. Chin up Danka-your favourite tournament is coming up!

thats why i said ''saint indian wells''
but this fucking wait kills me

I can only say that this is disappointing as this was a great opportunity for a quarter-final in a big event and also a chance to get seeded for Indian Wells and Miami.

Daniela hasn't been thrashed in any of her matches this year, even though she has crumbled in a few of them. She's always had a period in the match when she's played well but she hasn't sustained it, especially in adversity. In 2007, Daniela always regrouped in tight situations and came through but recently she hasn't. The opponents will know that and that gives them hope to keep fighting and hang around and that if they can do that then they have a chance. Again, this makes it harder for Daniela to win as she has to keep playing and fighting for every point to win the match and it's a lot harder for her to mentally break opponents and get them to tank when she's leading or has momentum. Players who are in form or have a big reputation get a lot of wins through intimidation as their opponent will give up more easily. With Daniela, her opponent will try to hang around because they feel their chance will come.
The mental scar tissue of that Australian Open semi-final is still raw and that loss plus her illness and injury in the first half of last year have knocked her to the ground and she's still fully not gotten up.

At least Daniela has been getting wins, albeit against moderate players, so she has a base to build on and while she's not beating good players, she is at least beating the players she should beat and she just needs a bit of luck and/or inspiration in a match. She does need a good win or at least a good performance against one of the top players to give her some confidence back and build momentum and form. Daniela & Ai are doing well in doubles and getting wins there will help her in singles. It's just about her enjoying her tennis and getting into a habit of winning matches, so good doubles form should transfer to singles. Her doubles form kept her going in 2006 after she had that devastating loss to Li Na and her mixed doubles run at Roland Garros 04 gave her confidence at one of the lowest ebbs of her career and she went on her run at Eastbourne a few weeks later.

Looking further ahead, Daniela's got virtually nothing to defend between Ponte Vedra Beach and the US Open, so almost every tournament she enters she'll be gaining points and she has too much talent not to start getting good wins sometime. This is disappointing but Daniela has a beachhead which to build from plus we know the talent and determination she has and she kept fighting in situations earlier in her career that would have destroyed lesser people but Daniela came through these crises. She'll do so again.

I promised earlier to look at 3-setters in 2007:

Auckland vs Cibulkova, wins first set, wins match
Aus Open vs Loit, lost first set, wins match
Aus Open vs Harkleroad, lost first set, wins match
Dubai vs Kirilenko, lost first set, wins match
Dubai vs Mauresmo, wins first set, loses match
Doha vs Daniilidou, lost first set, wins match
Doha vs Hingis, lost first set, wins match
Indian Wells vs Kanepi, wins first set, wins match
Indian Wells vs Peer, wins first set, wins match
Indian Wells vs Li, wins first set, wins match
Amelia Island vs Bammer, wins first set, loses match
Fed Cup vs Safarova, loses first set, loses match
Fed Cup vs Vaidisova, loses first set, loses match
Rome vs Rezai, loses first set, wins match
French Open vs Garrigues, wins first set, loses match
Birmingham vs Bartoli, wins first set, loses match
Hertogenbosch vs Shaughnessy, loses first set, wins match
Wimbledon vs Srebotnik, loses first set, wins match
Wimbledon vs Serena, loses first set, loses match
Stanford vs Chakvetadze, wins first set, loses match
San Diego vs Azarenka, wins first set, wins match
US Open vs Vakulenko, loses first set, loses match
Bali vs Davenport, loses first set, loses match
Kolkata vs Kirilenko, wins first set, loses match
Luxembourg vs Schnyder, wins first set, wins match
Luxembourg vs Ivanovic, wins first set, loses match
Linz vs Bondarenko, wins first set, wins match
Linz vs Vaidisova, loses first set, wins match

and what was claimed earlier was that she wasn't capable of turning the match around

14 times she lost the first set, 9 times she ended up winning the match.
Not really important I know, but I felt like doing it

This was another disappointing tournament in an extended series of them for Daniela. Her two wins against weak opposition were not the kind that suggest real optimism for the future (unlike the win last week v. Makarova). And certainly losing to a mediocre player like Razzano is another underwhelming performance.

I stand by what I said last week: there's no evidence whatsoever that Daniela is poised to make a return to the top twenty. I reiterate that she's lost 12 of 13 against the top 30. And ASJ passed along an even more sobering stat: that she hasn;t beaten a top fifty player since Moscow. The best we've seen her, though only for spurts, have been in the two losses to Cornet. Taken alone, there's nothing all that disconcerting in losing a close match to a top-fifteen player. The problem is that kind of performance would have been a middle-of-the-road showing for Daniela in the recent past. Now that represents the best we see from her. More often than not, she cannot sustain even that modest level of play.

That's the disappointing realisation that i'm coming to. When Daniela fell in the rankings earlier on her career, it literally took her 2 or 3 seasons of slow growth before she was back and at the "top" of womens tennis. Granted, her injury was was quite some time ago now, but it's only just approaching a year (a far cry from the 2-3 years she needed to be back firmly cemented in the top 20 the first time). Everything seems to be a slow process with Daniela. She seems to have spot fires of success (this season, these spot fires seems to only come in the form of winning the occasional set against Cornet), regardless of her of her ranking throughout her career, but her difficulty has always been maintaining it. She just doesn't have the confidence or maybe the concentration (i don't know....) in order to sustain a consistently high enough level of play to comfortably to beat any opponent at the moment. It's discouraging to say, but i'm not sure whether or not beating a top player is gunna regain Daniela any more consistency... It's probably gunna be a long and hard road back to the top. One we probably won't see her making this season.

But you know. We can always hang in for the spot fires

Judging from what I've seen of Daniela this season,she's playing a hundred times better than the unmitigated garbage she was producing post Wimbledon.

I have to agree with this. She is playing better than how she was during the latter half of last season, but she's just not sustaining it. It could be conditioning, but in yesterday's match, she had chances in every single game to win it. I wouldn't say she faded away in the third set, I just don't think she won the crucial points. Razzano won 34 points in the last set to Daniela's 28, yet the 6-2 scoreline made it look convincingly easy for Razzano, when it really wasn't. The 6 point difference was Razzano capitalising on her opportunities or Daniela giving it away (whichever was the case). In fact, in total Razzano won 95 points to 92, yet she won 3 games more than Daniela. The games were really tight, it's just Daniela didn't win the really important points, and this may be something she should work on - extra concentration on the bigger points???

Most of us didn't see the match, so I'm not sure whether Razzano was actually playing well on her break points or game points, or whether Daniela was making errors, but had Daniela won some of those game and break points she had, it would have been a totally different match and different outcome.

File this match under the "coulda, woulda, shoulda" folder, which in my opinion, is ever expanding.

I think for all of us, it's just so disheartening to see Daniela exit these tournaments early especially when she gets dealt a favourable draw and there are important ranking points to be sought, which would help her get a seeding in future tournaments and avoid potential first round clashes with Top 10 players. With these points added, she'll be about 36 in the ranking, and possibly won't be seeded for Indian Wells, unless two other players above her don't play I.W (with Venus and Serena not playing, she'll need two other players to withdraw to get seeded).

Damn that AO 2008 SF! Damn that illness! Damn that foot injury! I want things to change already!

OMG. Razzano plays not only like a top 10 but a top 5 player, top-class tennis.