The end of the beginning...

Cheers to Marat Safin! Today's match featured centenary Australian Open champion, Safin coming back from a set down to unleash some devastating play which quite literally blew Lleyton Hewitt off the court.

In the first set Safin had made a maddening number of unforced errors, effectively giving away 3 games worth of points and looked like he was having another of his unpredictable down days. The incredible talent which had wiped off the seemingly invincible Roger 'Achilles' Federer off the tournament board was hardly evident then.

Lack of aces, shots that went out of bounds, net-loving balls. Nothing seemed to be going right for Safin! Hewitt ended up giving a great hope to the Australian crowd in the form of a 6-1 first set lead.

The commentators were speculating that Safin might have to break a customary racket or two to get his game going, and soon after the first set with some more obscene errors, Safin sent his racket to bite the dust. The poor racket didn't know what was wrong, and being unable to rectify the game sent it to kiss the ground another 2 times.

Then, something stirred within Safin, I think the racket's spirit cried out to him or something haha. Nah just kidding :D

Anyway, Safin returned with a new racket somewhere in the 2nd set, proceeded to get his game on and show the world again that his Federer-beating skills weren't a fluke.

Hewitt was slowly beginning to understand why Federer got beat that day. Safin was beginning to regain his confidence and started firing scorching forehands to the sidelines forcing Hewitt to run really hard just to keep the ball in play.

Once again the Torturer was starting to tighten the screws on Hewitt. It also helped that he was starting to get his serve back with a total of 18 aces.

Safin claimed the championship with 3 straight sets after the first one down. I'm actually not surprised that he won really, just glad cause I think he deserved it, with his level of play. Well suffice to say the match was rather anti-climactic too considering that it failed to ignite my adrenal TNT like some of the previous matches, it did serve as a good step-by-step video of how to finish of a counterpuncher of Hewitt's caliber hehehe.

And the title is a reference to the fact that this is just the FIRST Grand Slam of the year! More great tennis to come! Oh boy, thank you Starhub for Cable TV!!!

Before I go on talking about my own match yesterday, I shall post the link to the stats
here.

Yesterday was retarded haha. Meyer and I played tennis from 7 to 9 in the evening with 4 balls. We continued the previous match where I was down by two sets and I lost the final set yesterday 6-3 to let Meyer claim the title of January Open Champion (I made that up haha). The best part is we both lost......a lot of balls that is. After hitting 3 balls out of the retrievable area, I went out to get them back and also get one ball which was probably left there by other people who played before us.

At the end of the slightly less than 2-hours Meyer and I went home with NO BALLS. And yes, we ended cause the last ball was hit out. Damn...

My backhand and slicing still sucks, no updates there. My forehands have improved though, after copying some of Roddick's style hehehe. Actually managed to get more power into my forehand that way. Watching the pros play does have it's advantages!

Sheesh, I wanna go play Shadow Hearts 2 liao, so will end this post with a little interesting tale haha.

Remember the 'stranger' ball I picked up earlier on? That ball produces approximately twice as loud 'pig porks' than the balls we normally use. Makes your strokes SOUND harder and faster mwahaha.

In fact, I think Meyer and I were startling the kids in the other court with the really booming sounds coming from our strokes. Those shots were crackers baby! (Inside joke :D)