Archive for July 24th, 2010

Wimbledon juniors runner-up adjusting to pro tournaments

Wimbledon juniors runner-up adjusting to pro tournaments
Jordan Cox is starting to get the feel of professional tennis. Cox, an 18-year-old from Bradenton, Fla., advanced to the quarterfinals of the Millennium Tennis Club $10,000 Men’s Futures on Thursday by defeating John-Paul Fruttero, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4.

Read more on The Joplin Globe

Watch FIFA World Cup live||Uruguay vs France live stream online on 11,june 2010

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Watch FIFA World Cup live||Uruguay vs France live stream online on 11,june 2010

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Exactly four hours and thirty minutes after the first 2010 World Cup match ball will be kicked in South Africa, Uruguay and France will lock horns at the Cape Town Stadium. The match will actually kick off at 18:30 GMT (20:30 South African local time), on Friday, June 11.

Some match facts between France and Uruguay don’t favor the 1998 World Cup champions too much by the way. France could only win one of their five games against the Uruguayans, with two of those ending in defeats. The last time France and Uruguay played, the game ended in a goalless draw; the French know that a repeat of this result will drive many of their supporters to criticize and boo them off.

However, if Uruguay are looking to take advantage of France’s misunderstanding issues, they may also have to think about their own statistics related to Friday’s fixture. The most important of those is the fact that the Uruguayans have not won any of their last twelve matches against European teams. But now, Diego Forlan is a Europa League winner and his experience has turned him into a true leader in attack for Uruguay.

Having clinched seven goals in only thirteen appearances for his side during the 2010 World Cup qualifiers, Diego Forlan is poised to make an impact in Cape Town against France. Can the veteran forward shake Les Bleus’ defensive lines that can boast of a few facts like these ones:

France vs Uruguay – 2002 World Cup match.Fact 1: Four consecutive clean sheets in France’s last four matches against South American teams in a World Cup.

Fact 2: Three wins and a draw in France’s last four matches against South American teams in a World Cup.

Fact 3: Only one goal conceded in their last four World Cup opening games.

Well, perhaps La Celeste Olimpica will find luck from above. Something similar to Thierry Henri’s sending off the last time both sides met (2002 World Cup) might benefit Oscar Tabarez’s men.

Likewise, France could also benefit from the influence of Franck Ribery who will be featuring in his first competitive fixture since sustaining a red card in Bayern Munich’s UEFA Champions League semi-final fixture against Lyon in May.

Sam Stosur French Open

Australia’s No.1 player Sam Stosur discusses her chances of winning French Open 2010.

Sania Mirza Vs Shoaib Malik Package

Sania Mirza Vs Shoaib Malik – GEO NEWS

Serena hoping to play at U.S. Open, agent says

Serena hoping to play at U.S. Open, agent says
Serena Williams is hoping to recover from a right foot injury in time to play at the U.S. Open, the agent for the 13-time Grand Slam singles champion said Tuesday.

Read more on Sports Illustrated

ATP Tennis – James Blake Loses in the First Round and is out of Wimbledon

The American and ATP No. 17th, James Blake, was unable to win for the third straight time in Grand Slam tournaments, losing against the 50th ATP-ranked, Italian Andreas Seppi, 7-5, 6-4, 7-6(5), this past Monday.

Blake had beaten the Italian in their last two meetings, but for some reason he couldn’t do it this time at Wimbledon. Moreover, the American also lost in the first round of this year‘s French Open, after exiting in the fourth round of the Australian Open back in January.

Nevertheless, Blake thought he was ready for Wimbledon since he has trained hard and his fitness was extremely well, but maybe his confidence was the problem.

Since the beginning Blake started making too many errors, which gave Seppi an advantage in the first set by winning it 7-5.  During the second set, Blake expected to take advantage of his best shot, the forehand, but Seppi managed to neutralize it forcing Blake into exchange backhands and at the end the Italian won the second set as well, 6-4.

In the third set, Blake though he had chances to get back into the match when he held one set point with a lead of 6-5, but he missed a forehand that went too long and tied the set. Blake then missed a 5-0 lead in the tiebreaker when the Italian went into a 7-0 run to win the set and the match.

At the end of the match, the American expressed his frustration for his bad performance and the disappointment of not getting further in Wimbledon.

“I still feel like I can play with anyone in the world, but it’s just, for some reason lately, it’s been very inconsistent. I’ve been doing all the training. I’ve been doing all the conditioning. I’m fit as I’ve been. I just haven’t been as confident, I guess.  But I still have the ability. It’s just frustrating, because it’s happening at big tournaments where I’m having my not-so-good performances,” stated the former world No.4.

On the other hand, the Italian Andreas Seppi stated his satisfaction on his performance especially because he played more aggressively than usual on Blake’s serve, which used to be one of his weaknesses.  Seppi also said that he was a little happier when he found out that his opponent would be Blake, instead of Juan Martin Del Potro, as it was originally planned but changed after the bracket was modified due to Nadal’s withdraw. According to Seppi, Del Potro has a very strong serve and he considered he would have a better chance with Blake, which he proved right on Monday.

Now after this loss, James Blake expects to regain his confidence and play better in the following tournaments since he knows in spite of his age, he still can compete within the top 10 players of the ATP rankings. Whereas for Andreas Seppi, this win increases his confidence and grows his expectations to advance in the tournament.

The next opponent of the Italian will be the French Marc Gicquel and the game will be played on June 24th.

Tennis Lessons – No Fear Of Losing

I have taught tennis players from all competitive levels not to dwell on past failures, but to keep moving forward, to always look ahead and never look back when.

I teach them that bad cycles will occur, so they should stay relaxed, wait for the cycle to change and the tide WILL turn….if they keep the right mental attitude.

I give them phrases like, “the next shot is more important than the last mistake.” Or, “in order to be good I have to make mistakes.”

I prepare them for the inevitable frustrations that will happen when they learn and play tennis. Does it work? Yes, most of the time, but sometimes the overwhelming negatives are just too much for the players’ emotions. As a result, they begin to analyze their foibles incorrectly. They whine, “All my practice and tennis lessons and look at what I have done! I couldn’t even make an easy shot. I’m such a horrible player.” Their focus goes off course; they drown in a flood of negatives. Usually all this drama begins because they are losing, NOT necessarily because they are playing poorly.

Let me tell you what tennis coach Robert Lansdorp saw in Maria Sharapova when he watched her play tennis at 14 years old. Even while she was suffering a devastating loss, throughout the entire match she continued to go for her shots again and again and again. Coach Lansdorp recognized this as the number one quality for a great player. You, too, should remember that if everything falls apart in your tennis game you can grab onto this one principle and ride out the storm!

In an article in Tennis Life Magazine (June 2005), the writer Alix Ramsay states: “By the time [Sharapova] was 14 and losing in her first professional tournament … Lansdorp knew he was onto something good. Mopping up the tearful teenager after she had been roughed up by an older, more experienced girl on the slow clay court, Lansdorp tried to convince Sharapova and Yuri [her father] that everything would work out all right in the end. Sharapova was going to make it.”

Lansdorp said, “I saw right there, the way she played: she played without fear. She wasn’t good enough that day because she would miss a ball, her shots weren’t accurate enough, but she had no fear of hitting it. She would never hold back or be afraid to lose. Every great champion, they have that when they walk on the court: they have no fear. They hate to lose but they are not afraid to lose.”

Did you catch the irony? Sharapova just got destroyed in a tennis match and Coach Lansdorp thinks she is unbelievably fantastic and is going to make it! What is this all about?

Before I go on, let me tell you something about Robert Lansdorp. He coached and was instrumental in the careers of Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport. I believe he may be someone we just might want to pay attention to! Maria Sharapova was brought to him for tennis lessons at the age of 11 because she had potential. Someone got that one right!

Did you notice that after Sharapova lost the match, Lansdorp did not say, “she is missing too much, that’s the big problem here. I have to straighten all of that out.” To Lansdorp, missing when she played tennis was irrelevant. Instead he keyed in on the fact that she had no fear of hitting the ball and no fear of losing. He totally ignored the loss!

Let me put this into simple terms for you. The most important principle to master when you play tennis is, “No fear of losing!”

Of course Lansdorp will go back to the drawing board with more tennis lessons and improve Sharapova’s consistency and accuracy, but that was NOT his main focus after the devastating loss. His focus was her mental attitude.

In Lansdorp’s mind she was a winner not because she won or lost a match, but because she lost with the correct mental attitude. This is the stuff of champions!

Champions do not win all the time – they just never give up trying! Maria Sharapova never quit in that match; she just kept swinging and swinging and swinging. To this day she is still swinging away when she plays tennis. In fact, she swung her way to a Wimbledon title!

Now wipe the frown off of your face, get back on the courts, play tennis and keep fighting…I don’t care how many times you lose! That is the stuff of champions.

Dairy of Spread Bettor July

Thursday 2nd July

<a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=’http://www.sportingindex.com’>Wimbledon</a> Ladies Semi-Finals Day and both Venus and Serena look like good things in their respective matches. Serena is up first against Elena Dementieva and then older sister Venus tackles the double-fault machine that is Dinara Safina! However, I’m torn between trying to nick a few quid by buying set supremacy again or selling the total number of games in their respective mismatches.

I watched the opening set of Serena’s match and was relieved not to have sold total games when she lost the opening set in a tie break. I bought her set supremacy in-running at 5 for £15 and was thrilled when she bounced back to land the next two sets to go through 6-7 7-5 8-6. I had won £150, but had won it the hard way.

I left Venus’s game alone and kicked myself for not selling total games. She blew Safina away and only lost one game in the whole match. The total games make-up was just thirteen – I now know what they say it’s unlucky for some!

Friday 3rd July

Andy Murray’s date with destiny. Could the British number one become our first finalist for donkey’s years (and plenty of British donkeys have tried in that time)? I was massively against him and was all over Andy Roddick. If Murray struggled to cope with the power of Wawrinka, he was hardly likely to contain a man that can serve over 150mph (not even my sneezes go that fast!).

I had £100 on Roddick at 11/4 to make the Wimbledon Final (he was actually the same price to win the game, but this bet eliminated the risk of Murray wimping out with an injury and the bet being voided – good thinking eh!). I also sold Murray’s set supremacy for £10 at 8 in-running.

The rest, as they say, is history. Roddick won the first, third and fourth sets which was enough to send him through, Murray out and me home happy! The perfect result and at last I’d won back my losses from earlier in the tournament. I won £275 on my fixed-odds bet and £280 on my spread bet.

I was glad that Murray lost because I still think he has a lot to learn about losing. His rant at the umpire after losing the third set was one thing, but to have a go at a ball girl was shocking… ‘get me a water’ he demanded! At the end of the game he acted like a spoilt child, grabbed his bag and sulked off to the changing rooms. No proper thank you to his thousands of fans, who in some cases had paid a small fortune, and no proper wave goodbye.

Judy Murray needs to buy her son a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s IF. In it he’ll read a line about meeting with triumph and disaster… the latter he is now only too familiar with. However, it is the bit about treating ‘those two impostors just the same’ he needs to brush up on!

Saturday 4th July

I’m now the one who has to learn to meet disaster as well as triumph. My theory that the final Lions test would be free-scoring was way off the mark. I bought £10 of points at 48 and the 28-9 final scoreline meant a £110 loss. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t followed a £10 buy of Venus Williams’ set supremacy at 8 and a £280 loss. I still don’t know how or why she played so badly – particularly when she performed so well in the doubles only hours later. I’m convinced that the girls’ father decides who is going to win each match-up and the girls follow orders – this year it was Serena’s turn!

Listen to me. Just a few paragraphs after having a go at Murray for being a bad loser, here I am ranting about a conspiracy theory… there is something in it though!

Sunday 5th July

I fancied buying total games in the Men’s Final at 39 (as I’d cleaned up 12 months earlier with the very same bet), however, I was put off by the potential danger of a quick Federer demolition job. He’d seen off the big serving Karlovic earlier in the week in straight sets and I was afraid he’d do the same to Roddick. I left it alone and it made up at 77! Basically, I let a 38 point profit slip me by… in monetary terms… £380.

It was really irritating and was made more so by the fact that total aces also made up at 77 and I had seriously considered buying those too! I didn’t lose a penny on the final, but missing out on those two bets had inadvertently cost me a fortune. I think that Sporting Index need to nick the SAS’s motto ‘Who Dares Wins’. Maybe that will encourage more ‘fence-sitters’ like me to climb down from their perches and back their opinions and hunches!

Monday 6th July

Not much going on in the world of sport, but just 48 hours to go until the start of the Ashes series and time to build up a selection of long term positions. I sold the lowest all-out team score at 155 for £5 even though the Racing Post advises a buy at 165. England showed in Sabina Park in February that when they want to roll over, they roll over properly. They were all out for 51 that day and 155 just looks too big in my book with little downside (hopefully)!

I sold Cook series runs at 355 for £5 because I think he’ll get found out and bought Mitchell Johnson’s all-rounder performance at 650 for £3.

As for the first test, even though all the pundits are suggesting it will be a spinners paradise, a good source has told me that the square will be pretty flat as Cardiff are desperate for five days worth of gate receipts. I had a fixed-odds bet on the draw (£200 at 6/4) and will sit back and hope.

Tuesday 7th July

It’s pouring with rain and while normal human beings go out and buy umbrellas, spread bettors look to buy distances at national hunt venues in the wettest parts of the country.

Now, I don’t live too far away from Uttoxeter and after a lunchtime downpour of biblical proportions, I was certain that their evening meeting was going to be run on heavy ground rather than the good to soft as advertised in the paper. However, their six race card was full of big field open looking handicaps and my desire to be a buyer was quickly diluted.

In fact, I was tempted to sell once the market had risen above 40 and did so at around 6pm… let the lemmings jump over the cliff and watch them fall I thought! Sadly for me and my lemmings, the rain continued to fall and the meeting was abandoned without a race being run. Surely a make-up of zero?!

Wednesday 8th July

I missed the first ball of the entire Ashes series listening to a spotty teenager in an o2 shop bamboozling me with different packages for my new blackberry – my old one took a crashing fall in London last week and hit the pavement hard. If it had been a racehorse, the green screens would have been erected straight away!

Anyway, having told me that my new phone could do everything, my able assistant asked me if I needed internet access. I asked her whether it could vibrate in my pocket every time a wicket fell in the Ashes. She laughed at my joke – I wasn’t joking though.

Back to the <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=’http://www.sportingindex.com’>cricket</a> and Cook was back in the pavilion early which was good news for my long term positions and Johnson struck with the ball twice before lunch. This series is going to be fun, I can feel it in my blackberry.

FRENCH OPEN BETTING ? WOMEN’S SEMI FINALS

Day twelve at Roland Garros sees the Semi Final matches between the final four players left in the Women’s tournament. Who will be playing in Saturday’s final? BetRepublic.com previews both matches here:

Elena Dementieva v Francesca Schiavone Tennis Betting:

The bookmakers are having a hard time determining who will be the player that progresses to the French Open final with both PaddyPower.com and William Hill having odds of 5/6 for both Dementieva and Schiavone to win the match. It looks like it’ll be a close match, but will it be the fifth or seventeenth seed that progresses to the final?

After a relatively easy route through the tournament, Dementieva came across Nadia Petrova in the Quarter Finals. Petrova had defeated Venus Williams in round four and started the Quarter Final match with great confidence and won the first set in an injury broken sixty-two minutes. From there, however, things went downhill for the nineteenth seed as Dementieva got into her stride and won the next two sets 6-2, 6-0 to book her Semi Final place. She will need to perform like she did in those final two sets to progress to the final, but will Dementieva be able to?

Schiavone is the first Grand Slam semi finalist from Italy since the Open era began and she has claimed this feat in style. She has beaten three seeded players on route to the final four, Na Li (11) in round three, Maria Kirilenko (30) in round four and Caroline Wozniacki (3) in the Quarters. More impressive than that is the fact that bar dropping her first set of the tournament she has won the following ten sets to reach the Semi Finals. She is clearly the player in the better form of the two, but can she reach the final?

This will be the eleventh meeting of the two players, with Dementieva holding a 6-4 advantage on the scorecard. Dementieva has won the last three encounters and Schiavone’s last victory against the Russian came in 2007. Also, they have met just once on clay with Dementieva emerging victorious. Despite this I feel that Schiavone will add another victory to her previous four wins against Dementieva as her form at Roland Garros has been exceptional so far. My money will be on Francesca Schiavone to beat Elena Dementieva at odds of 5/6.

Jelena Jankovic v Samantha Stosur Tennis Betting Tips:

After beating Justine Henin and Serena Williams in the last two rounds, it is unsurprising that Samantha Stosur is the favourite with William Hill at odds of 8/13 to reach the final of the French Open. My pre-tournament favourite Jelena Jankovic is available at 6/5. Who will be right, me or the bookies?

Of the two players Jankovic has had the easier route to this point in the tournament and has only had to defeat the twenty-third and twenty-seventh seeds in rounds three and four. Unsurprisingly she has dropped just the one set on the way to the final four and that came against Kaia Kanepi in the second round.

Stosur, on the other hand, has beaten the top seed in Serena Williams in the Quarter Finals and the four time winner of the French Open in Justine Henin in round four. Henin started off the stronger of the two in their match and won the first set 6-2 in thirty-two minutes before Stosur won the next two sets 6-1, 6-4 to book her place in the last eight of the competition. Filled with confidence from beating Henin she raced off into a 6-2, 5-3 lead before Serena came back and won the second set in a tie-breaker. The final set was nip and tuck until the very end when Stosur broke Williams at 7-6 and won the match 6-2, 6-7, 8-6 in what was an epic game. Can she carry on from there and book her place in the final?

These two players have met on four previous occasions and Jankovic has won three compared to Stosur’s single win. All four matches have been played on hard courts and they have met twice this year with the score tied at 1-1, with Stosur winning the last game in Miami. None of their four matches have gone to three sets, but I feel that this one will with Stosur in the form of her life and highly confident after her last two victories. Unfortunately for her I am sticking with my original prediction of Jankovic to win the title, so I’ll be backing her at odds of 6/5 to win this match. I’ll also be putting a small bet on Jankovic to win 2-1 @ 7/2 with PaddyPower.com.

BetRepublic.com Recommends:

•    Francesca Schiavone to beat Elena Dementieva @ 5/6

•    Jelena Jankovic to beat Samantha Stosur @ 6/5

•    Jelena Jankovic to win 2-1 @ 7/2

Yahoo!Xtra Kicks Off Round Two of Awards

Yahoo!Xtra Kicks Off Round Two of Awards
Yahoo!Xtra has kicked off round two of its digital strategy awards following a successful launch of the awards in April.

Read more on Scoop.co.nz

Novak Djokovic in a commercial for HEAD {extremly funny}

In this action replay we get to see Novak Djokovic’s finesse both on and off the court. In between shots he manages to flirt with a young lady in the crowd, charming her with everything from a 90s boy band dance routine, nipple tassels and even a Navy Seals balancing act. You can download video here: rapidshare.com

Where to watch andy murray vs roger federer live?

Where to watch roger federer vs andy murray live online for free.