Hi people, I’m back from Belgrade and Serbia vs. Japan Fed Cup tie and I’ll share some of my impressions with you.
First of all, not surprisingly, it was not much of a challenge for Serbia to beat Japan and reach the Fed Cup World Group play-offs for the first time.
Serbia cruised to an unassailable 3-0 lead with world No.3 Jelena Jankovic beating world No.26 Ai Sugiyama 6-3 6-2 in the Belgrade Arena. On Saturday, Serbia had established a 2-0 lead with world No.8 Ana Ivanovic defeating Ai Sugiyama 6-4 6-4 and Jelena Jankovic cruising past Ayumi Morita, ranked 86th in the world, 6-1 6-0.
In the fourth dead singles rubber, Ivanovic notched up her second win of the weekend by romping past Morita 6-1 6-2. Team Japan, consisting of Rika Fujiwara and Aiko Nakamura, won the doubles match, when the Serbian team of Jelena Jankovic and Ana Jovanovic retired after the second set, so the final score of the Serbia vs. Japan Fed Cup tie was 4-1.
The atmosphere in the Belgrade Arena was very good, although not too ecstatic because there were no close matches. However, the crowd was active and, as I learned, it was the record number of spectators for the Fed Cup, as on Saturday 15,118 people came to support their country’s team. On Sunday, the number of spectators didn’t drop, at least not that I could notice.
There was one major drawback, though. A lot of people, including me, couldn’t see the scoreboard. Imagine that! And the chair umpire wasn’t talking clearly enough. So, we had to count the points by ourselves, which was a hassle. Hahaha, one woman beside me was even calling someone on the phone to inform her about the current score. Organizers, are you listening?
Overall, however, I had a great time, and I want to thank all the players for giving their maximum and making our weekend entertaining. I have some more pictures and two videos I think. As you can imagine, they are not of high quality, but hey, better something than nothing. In the coming hours I will select some pics and vids and add them to my Flickr and YouTube accounts.
By the way, as you can notice, Jankovic wasn’t wearing her green ANTA dress, while Ivanovic, of course, stayed with her purple adidas one.
thanks for the fed cup report. nice, easy win for Serbia.
i can’t believe the part about not knowing the score. i got a laugh when i read about the woman calling someone for the score to a match she’s watching, lol. seriously tho, something needs to be done about that.
and i wonder what dress JJ was wearing. at least it wasn’t that ANTA dress. it looks Reebok-y w/o the logo, and much too plain on her. she’ll definitely have something else to wear in upcoming tourneys, hopefully something nice.
I couldn’t believe it either, is that so difficult a task to enable all the spectators to see the score? I’m not sure about my accuracy, but I think that about 1/5 of the spectators couldn’t see the scoreboard’s front part haha, we could see the back. 🙂
JJ was wearing ANTA, but yeah, it looks Reeboky, I agree. It’s nice, but quite boring, just like some of those light pink, light blue, white Reebok outfits from the last season.
It was great to see Serbia getting through the Fed Cup tie. I was really happy to see Ana Ivanovic winning so convincingly! For some reason I have not liked any of JJ’s outfits since her red Olympics dress last year. I think if she got more involved with designing her own tournament wear then we would see her in some really nice dresses. Some of the Reebok outfits that she has worn in the past like the Roland Garros one last year just did not suit her at all.
This white dress she wore in the Fed Cup was pretty, but too bland. The green AO one was at least memorable.
I would like to see WTA tournaments in Belgrade. I do not like federation cup so much. I was watching tennis on TV from Belgrade. 🙂 Ana i Jelena did a great job, and it was very important for them to play these matches because they learnt something new and they took fantastic energy from homeland. 🙂 Especially, I think that this was so important to Ana Ivanovic. She has to find super trener and she will be the better player.
I’ve just read in Ana’s diary that she’ll announce her new coach soon! That’s very good news.
I’m looking forward to the WTA tournament in Belgrade, too.
I love Jelena and Ana so much. Sometimes, I think that I am not normal. :))))
Haha :))