Molik's Failure To Do Homework Almost Spoils School Holiday Activity
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 19, 2007
SOME days, Melbourne Park looks and feels like a giant school holidays program. The Fanatics at Vodafone Arena yesterday were like kids at a school concert, assembled in rows, brightly dressed in identical yellow with matching homemade sombreros, all their lines learned off by heart. Like schoolkids, they wanted everyone to see and hear them.
The heroine of this pantomime was Alicia Molik, a local making a storybook comeback from injury and despair. Her reception was thunderous, the effect exaggerated by the fact that the roof was closed against the morning drizzle. Cameras whirred. If this could be kept snappy, we would all be out in time for Lleyton.But there was a hitch. Kaia Kanepi seemed not to know her bit part. Yes, Kanepi was ranked 77, Molik 141, but that was an accident of numbers. Yes, Kanepi is her country's women's player of the year. But that country is Estonia (population 1.3 million, average temperature 4.5 degrees) on the Gulf of Finland. It's a practice country. Yes, Kanepi has her own website, but on the homepage is not a photograph of her but a cartoon image.At first yesterday, Kanepi was no laughing matter for Molik. Tall and hard-hitting, she seemed to fill up her end of the court. She won three games before Molik won one, and took the first set in less than half an hour. Kanepi's favourite surface is clay, and she is strictly a back-courter, but it did not matter as she picked off Molik on both sides. Molik missed openings and lines, caught only her frame. It was not so much that she was a metre behind Kanepi as a year. In 2006, Kanepi played 55 matches, Molik 25, and it showed.A damning silence reigned. But Molik, contradicting the evidence of the eye, said later she had not felt lost on the court. She said she had squandered chances early, and let Kanepi run away with the set, but was confident she would prevail. "I knew things could really only get better," she said. "I actually didn't feel too bad after the first set. I knew what I needed to get going."This was not how it appeared to watchers. What was once a massed chorus was reduced to silence, punctuated by a single, plaintive cry: "Let's go, Molik." The anxiety was palpable. One half-expected the call to go out for a parent who was handy with a monkey wrench.In the second set, Molik changed her game, hitting the ball lower at Kanepi and with less pace, forcing her to run. Kanepi's stamina was suspect, but until now, Molik had not put the question to her. It was as if she had expected to dominate, had been taken by surprise, and had taken until now to develop a Plan B."She was hitting pretty big, and I was tempting her into committing errors," she said. "In the end, I felt like she didn't see any holes. She pressed and pressed, and eventually she committed a lot more errors than myself." The match turned on the eighth game of the second set. It was a protracted struggle in which Kanepi, the server, five times held game point, but could win none, while visibly weakening. When Molik at last gained a point for a break, she seized it. Kanepi won only two more games for the match.The last set was a mirror of the first, lasting barely half an hour. Kanepi made more errors. Molik made a passing shot on the run and stood with her biceps flexed in a strongman pose. Kanepi at one point parodied her own helplessness, theatrically sticking out an unavailing racquet at a ball that had long since passed beyond her reach. So did the villain fall.The spectators became bolder as Molik did, calling their own lines and chanting endlessly. At match's end, Molik thanked the fans, saying they had worked as hard as she had. Then she donned one of the sombreros, whereupon all laughed and the curtain fell.Molik has today off. Everyone else will have to check the noticeboard for activities.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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