Is Anyone Interested?

[Butterbun]

Australian Tennis Open, Ladies final won by Serena Williams. Her 19th Grand Slam Title and have now gone one better than Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. I think she might try for more. Steffi Graf has 22.

[seekeerz]

I'm looking forward to tonight's match too ...Andy is playing very well, but then so is Djokovic.

Think Mauresmo has done wonders for him, hope it all pays off.

[seekeerz]

What frilly entices knickers ??? They all seem to wear shorts and that's just the girls....the guys wear long elastic supports or some such !!

[Butterbun]

It promises to be a very good match. Shorts became popular seekeerz when a naughty photographer caught Martina Hingis unawares some years ago, the girls started covering up carefully after that. Shaking the fist grumpy, is to gee themselves up, it's called 'passion'.

[Butterbun]

Last year after Wimbledon, a French male player made a remark about women players and fees. The Top Lady player asked him, 'who comes to watch you play?' That shut him up straight away as when she plays, the stands were always packed.

[New Judge]

I don't denigrate the ladies. They play well - as well as they can, they work very hard and deserve their success. I also appreciate the physiological differences which limit their performance. I simply find their game unexciting and purely on the basis that they spend only about 60% of the time that the men spend on court over the course of a tournament the idea that they warrant equal prize money is preposterous. The fact that they have expenses and family committments is irrelevant. If it were not then all workers with similar circumstances would receive the same amount of pay regardless of the work they do or the hours they put in.

Women attract big audiences for the finals of tournaments. But in the early stages where their matches are mixed in with the Men's on lesser courts they attract a very much smaller crowd. The fact is that, as with many sports, their game is simply not that attractive.

[THECORBYLOON]

Most matches apart from the Grand Slams are best of three sets for men and women so perhaps the Grand Slams should follow suit.

[jim360]

What certainly is true is that in women's tennis at the moment there's a frustrating situation where really the gap between world numbers 1 and 2 is so massive that there's not really a rivalry at all. Serena Williams is just head and shoulders above any other woman tennis player at the moment, at least when she decides to turn up. Makes for a less interesting spectacle at the big tournaments. In the men's game at the moment we've had much more competition, between the "big four" and the various young pretenders who in particular in 2014 managed to start shaking things up.

Ideally the new blood of Simona Halep, Eugenie Bouchard and others will start to come to the fore while Serena retires and we can start to have more meaningful rivalries at the top of the women's game.

[Baldric]

Good to see I can still pick a winner!

///"I'll be supporting whoever is playing against Murray!"
@ 21:57 Sat 31st Jan 2015///

[douglas9401]

I've left a pint of bitter and twisted behind the bar for you, Baldric.

[Baldric]

Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere Douglass9401!

[Butterbun]

It would have been kinder to support a fellow Brit.

[Cloverjo]

Shame for Andy. He played well to stick with Novak for the first two sets, but seemed to suddenly lack believe that he could keep it up. Sad. He'd looked great throughout the tournament. He must be gutted.

[Cloverjo]

^^^belief.

[campbellking]

I'm not a fan of tennis, but I get annoyed that women demand the same pay for essentially less work. In other sports, such as my own favoured sport of rowing, women had to argue hard to get the right to compete over the same Olympic distance as men ;in athletics, women had to campaign to get the right to compete over the marathon course (move away from the idiots who felt that women weren't physiologically suited to run that far).
It's a shame that when women in other sports have campaigned so hard to be competing over equal distances that female tennis players adopt this stance.

[Baldric]

///kinder to support a fellow Brit///

Even one who said he would support anyone but the English?

[Cloverjo]

Baldric, he's explained many times that it was a joke. He was 18 when he said it. Did you never say something daft when you were that age?

[Baldric]

Not a very good joke, I seem to remember not many laughed!

[murraymints]

sob sob....:0(

[Butterbun]

Holding a grudge for 10 years? Well, I never.

[tonyav]

Andy Murray say's he got distracted !.
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/other/murray-admits-distractions/ar-AA8QYSt