Article by Gerhard Grundhammer

MARTINA SUCHA PREVIEW

The slovakian native Martina Sucha, who boasts a ferocious baseline game, has beaten J.Husavova in the first round of Montreal 6-2 and 6-2, and has now the honour to play with the 5th best tennis player of the world.

Though Martina is already the no42 of the world and no3 of her country, its very hard to get informations about the 1.70 meters tall girl. The career as a professional tennis-player has started in 2000 for Martina, but it took her over a year to enter the top100 and gain the first decent results, as reaching the final of Bratislava.

In 2002 the girl from a town named Nove Zamky won her first tournament, which was at Hobart, but she did not have to beat any big names there. So the semi final at Helsinki last week, where she lost to the next russian teenstar Kuznetsova, and beat Leon-Garcia at the quarters, or reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open should be counted at least as high, as her first win on an WTA-tournament. Reaching the quarters of Budapest, the 3rd round at Indian Wells, where she lost to Seles, or the 2nd round of Wimbledon (lost to Hantuchova) are normal results for a player of her strengh, but 11 (eleven) losses at first rounds in only 8 months is amazingly poor.

At her loss to Hantuchova at Wimbledon 2002 she served her second service with only 76 mph and still had 5 double foults. She only won 39% of those services, and thats probably the weakest point at her game. Also having only 11 unforced errors in three tight sets shows that Martina Sucha is not a player who is seeking any risk in her game. So to players outside the top15 she is just playing the ball into the field and waits for mistakes, which sometimes work, and sometimes doesnt, and from top 10 players she gets usually blasted away, which last happened as S.Williams played her, and Martina lost 6-0 and 6-1.

Jelena never played the right-handed slovakian before.