Article sent by Gerhard Grundhammer

Jelenas second opponenet at this years wimbledon tournament will be Emanuelle Gagliardi, the swiss no 4 and winner of 6 ITF tournaments.

Emanuelle was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and though her father is a director of a Swiss Bank, she has paid her own way on the WTA tour by hard work and determination - which earned her a current World ranking of 64. This tenacity was demonstrated when she lost the longest tie-break in WTA history 19-21 against Tara Snyder before coming back to win the match in three sets.

"Manu" as she likes to be called it 26 years old, 1.71 meters tall and like Jelena a right-handed player, who likes every surface, and like Jelena she seems rather shy, if it comes to the topic of gaining media attention. As our girl met Emanuelle for the fouth time in her career, last year at the opening round of Roland Garros, i completely failed to find any information about her, but now she has an official homepage which is well worth a visit if you speak french. The URL for that is www.e-gagliardi.com and i also felt free to rob the pictures of her from that site :-)

Beside that match i already mentioned Jelena played Emanuelle 3 more times, and beat her at all 4 occasions. In fact, in this century, Jelena did not even loose a set to the girl with the "bluer than blue" eyes.

2003 seems to become quite a good year for Emanuelle. She opened her season with a semifinal appearence at Auckland, leveled that result at Estoril, and had quite good runs at Indian Wells (4th round), Key Biscane (3rd round) and Madrid where she reached the quarters, and so she might look over the other 11 tournaments she has played and produced rather disappointing results.

One of those disappointing tournaments might be worth a closer look as first it happened only last week, second it was on grass and third she played Jelenas first round opponent of Wimbledon (Baltacha) there and lost in straight sets!

But nevertheless Mrs. Gagliardi is on position no 40 on the race to the championships this year, where only results from 2003 count, which means she is only 15 positions behind Jelena, which should make her a very dangerous opponent for our Princess.

To gain the honour to play Jelena today at court no 4, she beat Cohen Aloro 6-2, 4-6 and 6-3, scored 2 aces vs the french girl (and also had 2 doublefaults) and was also nearly even on scoring winners (27) and unforced errors (28).

Everything looks promising for the match of the two beauties who both live at Monaco and so I feel really sorry that i cant tell you the starting time, as there will be a mens-doubles match of two unseeded pairs before, which could last between one and 4 hours and also a mens singles match, involving 11th seed Jiri Novak. But then: ITS JELENA TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And if Jelena manages to contol her biggest opponent named Dokic, she should well be able to control her other oppoent named Gagliardi as well as the match, and take it home in straight sets.