Article by Glyn James

Jelena Dokic has blasted her way into the QF of the L.A. Championships by defeating the Russian #1 Anastasia Myskina.  It took Jelena just one hour to wrap up a straight sets victory and gain some much needed confidence.

The first set began poorly for Jelena as she threw away the first couple of games without showing any great effort.  Jelena wasn't even blinking when she was missing shots.  She just hit and hoped, and when she missed, she just moved quickly on to the next point without seeming bothered at all.  It looked like being one of those tournaments where Jelena really didn't want to play, and things were looking grim.  Fortunately, Myskina had also began hitting some poor shots and Jelena was back in the set in no time.  Jelena had now began to find some rhythm in her ground strokes and was moving Myskina from corner to corner at will, but, with Myskina's pace and the slowness of the court, Jelena was unable to hit as many winners as she would have liked.  Jelena's service was finally looking stable though, and her flat second serve was consistently finding it's mark.  Jelena really took the game to Myskina and Myskina was unable to answer the questions that Jelena's pounding groundstrokes were continually asking.  After 23 minutes on court, Jelena took the first set 6-3.

Myskina raised her game for the second set, and with Jelena still playing far from her best, it was going to take a lot of fighting to finish Myskina off.  Jelena reacted brilliantly to Myskina's raise of game and began playing better herself.  Jelena was clobbering everything Myskina threw at her, and on a quicker court, the match would have been over a lot quicker.  Jelena ran up a 4-2 lead to put herself in a commanding position, but Myskina still refused to give up.  There was a slight expectancy to see Jelena's concentration and serve drop, but it never happened.  Jelena played with extreme professionalism and played some very clever points.  At 5-4 in the second, Jelena had the chance to serve out the match.  It was quite an edgy match in which Myskina had break points.  At break point down, Jelena played an exceptional drive volley which landed extremely close to the line.  There was no call from either the linesman nor the umpire and you only had to look at Jelena's facial expression to see how much she wanted to win.  Jelena kept her cool and served out the match after Myskina hit a ball wide.  Jelena took the match 6-3 6-4.

Some interesting points to note:
- As I pointed out after last week's loss to Rubin, Jelena's volleying was exquisite and I suggested that we could see her coming in more often.  The win over Myskina furthered that trend as Jelena won 9 of her 13 net approaches.

- Jelena's first serve percentage was 64%.  That matched Serena's first serve percentage in her first round defeat over Anna Smashnova.

- Jelena hit just 5 double faults (only 1 in the first set).

All in all it was a very encouraging performance from Jelena, both with her technique, and her concentration.  Whilst she is still likely to suffer a loss at the hands of Serena in the next round, the task doesn't seem quite as impossible as it seemed at the start of the week.  Let's see if we can get behind her!