Tina Pisnik is probably one of the girls on the Wta tour, Jelena knows best. They were both born in towns which used to belong to the now not anymore existing Yougoslavian Republic, used to play doubles together in junior events and already faced each other 4 times since they both turned professional. Jelena won all 4 of those matches, and her win at Roland
Garros in 2000 (3-6, 7-6 and 6-4) as well as Jelenas victory over the 1.73 meters tall girl at Amelia Island (7-5, 5-7 and 6-1) just a few weeks ago, are probably the results which are worth mentioning most.

Tina is a right handed player who was never able to settle down in the top 50 but has been close to them for about 3 years now. Her main problem seems to win the big points in a match and though she beat the czech talent Klara Koukalova yesterday 7-6 and 6-1 she had problems at the decisive moments of the match, again. She needed 14 break points for her 8 breaks whilst Klara broke her 5 times, though she had only 7 break points...... and that leads to Tinas second weakness: Her serve! Not only that its far away from being a weapon, it also tends to let her down at crucial moments! 5 double faults and only one ace would be alright numbers for a girl who is using her serve as a weapon or at least to take advantage of it, but are hilarious numbers for a player like Tina, who neither serves with much power nor with much spin.        

"Contolled Offense" are probably the best words to describe her game style. She hit 20 winners at her opening round match (25 unf. errors), which is actually a pretty impressive number, and even scored 7 points at the net. Thats actually stats you would expect from a top 10 player, but not from the no 54 of the world.

"Ups and Downs" are maybe the best fraze to describe the past months of Tinas career. Actually there were many "downs" (she is 6-10 since the Australian Open and did not really beat a top player in that period, beside at one event) and one "up": Rome! There Tina had to qualify for the main draw and did not only win those two rounds, but also the next 3 matches (beating 11th seed Maleeva in three sets) before she failed to Ay Sugiyama in the quarters.

The no 3 of Slovenia has won one tournament in her career so far: Bol in 2000 and the best result she reached at the 11 times she tried her luck at Grand Slam tournaments was a third round appearence at Wimbledon in 2000. A result she could level today, at about 4pm local time on court 2 (7am Los Angeles, 10am New York, 3pm London and midnight in Sydney (thats the night from Thursday to Friday...) ).

But though Tina seems to be a very nice girl who cares a lot about her fans, and even runs her own website www.tinapisnik.com, which is well worth a visit, we neither wish her nor believe the 22 year old girl from Maribor will reach the third round of the French Open 2003.

If only believing in Jelena Dokic would be easier these days......