Tatiana Panova from the russian capital Moscow will be the third girl this year who tries to beat Jelena Dokic.

Tatiana is 27 years now, and a very defensive player. She has a weak but save first serve, and a very week and not even very save second one. When the ball is played, she is hardly going for winners and only waiting for mistakes of her opponents. I did not find a single match statistic of her, where she either hit more winners or more unforced errors as her opponent.

She is on the tour for nine years now, and though she never won a title, she improved her ranking every year she played until she reached number 20 in september 2002.

From then on things went different for Tatiana.... ok, she still beat Jelena Dokic for the first time in three attempts in oktober at Filderstadt, when Jelena was suffering the emotional pressure of the split from her Family (Jelena won the two previous meetings 6-2, 6-2 at the Final of Sarasota and 6-3, 6-1 at Rome in 2000), and reached the third round of the Australian Open in 2003 to level her best Grand Slam result for the fifth time, but what happened after that success to Tatiana sounds like a complete mistery to me.

After the Australian Open 2003, the righthanded player lost all 4 opening rounds at the next tournaments she entered, and after a decent performance at Key Biscane, where she reached round 3, she only managed to win one match at the next 5 tournaments she played. Especially the losses at Warsaw and Berlin, where she only scored 5 games of Kleinova and Pistolezi in 2 matches must have been frustrating for the small russian (she is only 1.54 meters), and so she decided to take a break.

The break lasted till December where she played a 50.000$ ITF tournament in the States but again she lost at the Quarters, and this year did not start well again. At Auckland she lost the second qualification round, at Sydney she could at least qualify, but lost the opening match as well as at the Australian Open.

But now its "Carpet-time", Panovas favourite surface. At Tokyo she beat first Zheng from China and then worlds no 8 Elena Dementieva, both in straight sets.

And so Panova should be a dangerous opponent for Jelena, though she dropped in the rankings to position no 250.

"Tatiana is a fighter. If shes in a match she returns just everything. If she got her rhythm going its very tough to play against her. You can always loose to her" - Nadja Petrova

Lets hope Jelena is already strong enough for that challenge