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For a disaster, it wasn’t a bad result. And it also spoke volumes about the high standards that Dinara Safina sets for herself as she bids to win a breakthrough grand slam tournament.
Asked whether she was pleased with a relatively comfortable 6-3 6-4 win over Frenchwoman Alize Cornet in the quarter-finals of the Sydney International on Wednesday, the woman once best known as Marat Safin’s little sister, scoffed.
“Pleased?” she offered with almost incomprehension.
“I think it was disaster, the match today.”
The “disaster” came in the shape of Safina allowing her opponent to capture a 4-1 lead in the second set, an advantage that amounted to nought as the Russian reeled off the next five games to claim the match.
“If she (Cornet) would be a little bit more experienced … she just, I don’t know, she gave me the match I can say,” Safina said.
“Either I play completely different tomorrow and go in myself, or either I can just take my racquets and whatever.
“Because that’s not the way I want to play. I don’t like the way I’m playing. Just totally bad.”
It must have been an anomaly because not everything has been so bad of late for the Russian No.1.
By the end of the 2008 season she’d moved from No.15 to No.3 in the world rankings, made the final at Roland Garros and the semis at Flushing Meadows.
She kick-started 2009 tidily enough with three out of four singles wins at the Hopman Cup.
And while compatriot Svetlana Kuznetsova pulled out of the tournament with an abdominal strain on Wednesday and others complained about temperatures warm enough to bring in to play the heat policy – allowing women a ten minute break between the second and third sets – Safina offered no excuses.
Not even in victory.
“In my case, I never blame the weather. If I blame, I blame myself. But I don’t find the excuses. Weather, sun, raining, snow. If you’re ready, you’re ready. If not, you can find a hundred excuses,” she said.
The win sets up a semi-final with Japanese veteran Ai Sugiyama, the beneficiary of Kuznetsova’s withdrawal.
Fifth seeded Kuznetsova, who also withdrew from the tournament here in 2007, said the abdominal injury had bothered her on and off over the years but seemed reasonably confident of playing in Melbourne.
“I (will) do MRI on site tomorrow to figure out what I have there and see how it can be managed to cure this problem to be better for Melbourne,” she said.
There was better news for yet another Russian woman, Elena Dementieva, a winner in a tough three-set match against Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanska.
Dementieva tore through the first set but, on the back of a wobbly second serve, dropped the second before showing her class for a 6-2 5-7 6-4 victory.
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