Tamarine Tanasugarn Preview

Worlds no 28 and asias no 2, Tamarine Tanasugarn will try to stop the european no1, Jelena Dokic, from defending her title of the Princess Cup, tomorrow at 11.30 am local time.

Friday, 11.30 am local time, that is thursday 10.30 pm in New York/Montreal, friday 3.30 am in London/Dublin and 4.30 am in Belgrade/Rome.

Tamarine is 25 years of age, 1.65 meters tall and like Jelena a right-handed player who plays her backhand two-handed. She has never won a wta-title or been in a final of an important tournament, but had especially this year a few good results at Grand Slams: She reached round 3 of both Roland Garros and the Australian Open and round 4 at Wimbledon, where she lost to her most admired player, Monica Seles. Further she reached the finals of Canberra where she lost to Smashnova and Doho where she (again) lost to Seles.

Her further appearences in 2002 where nowhere near a top 30 player should perform. First round losses at Sarasota, Hamburg, Rome, Madrid, New Haven, Montreal and an early upset at round 2 of the US-Open by wild card player B.Bielik in straight sets must have been big disappointments to Tamarine.

Tammy, as she is called from her friends was born in Los Angeles, but her parents Virachai and Sunattra moved back to Thailand as she was 5, and stayed there until today. If you had problems to pronounce those names try the name of her coach: Panoomkorn Pradchuniv :-)

Usually its about time to write about her head to head vs. Jelena now, but because they never played eachother i tell you about two historical wins of Tamarine Tanasugarn: She was the first player to win a match at the Arthur Ashe Stadium at New York (vs. Chanda Rubin) and the first pro-tennis player to win a match in the new Millenium (vs. Ai Sugiyama on January 1st 2000 in Australia).

To reach the quarterfinal of the Princess Cup 2002 she beat Serra Zanetti 6-2 and 7-6 in round one, and Clarissa Fernandez 7-5 and 6-2 in round 2.