I was back at Melbourne Park for the ladies final, and this was taken when Maria was well on her way to winning her first Australian Open title. The match was good, as was the lighting and the crowd was mostly behind Ana Ivanovic (she is surely a darling of the cameras as Alan Wilkins rightly put it during a Wimbledon telecast).

Rest of the set : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157605851583844/

I still have a metric ton of photos to upload :p

Date : Jan 23rd 2008
Time : 2245 onwards...(local time)
Location : Melbourne, Australia

My flight from Brisbane was uneventful. Virgin Blue is pretty cool, you have (small) screens right in front of you to watch what you want and all the good stuff is pay per view :) The rate I guess for movies and channels was something in the range of 7-9 Australian Dollars. I didn't bother, since I was enjoying the lovely skies past sunset and the cities below. The first thing I noticed when I landed in Melbourne was the big notice that warns people against joking (yes you read that right) about bombs in baggage or terrorism. The notice went on to say it's an offence and that people do so will be arrested. Eeeks. Paranoia and more Security Theatre :)
( Read the rest of the entry... )
And that brought to an end, a very interesting Day 1 in Melbourne :)
Rest of the snaps : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157604290718622/

In approximately 12 hours, I'll be at the Rod Laver Arena and the schedule for the day looks like this :

Not before 1330 :

Women's Singles Semi-Final - Maria Sharapova Vs Jelena Jankovic

Followed by :

Women's Singles Semi-Final - Ana Ivanovic Vs Daniela Hantuchova

And then Not before 1930 :

Men's Singles Semi-Final - Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Vs Rafael Nadal

The matches are like...umm...amazing. I'm hoping to get some good pics, fingers crossed.

PS : Oh and Australia has amazing beaches and even more amazing babes

I just want Andre Agassi to go on and win this year's US Open. And then retire in style. Long shot, but if he could take out Baghdatis, anything's possible.

Go Andre. Show them who the boss is :)

PS : I woke up early to see the match. Was surely worth it.

Andre "Kickarse" Agassi will retire from Tennis after this year's Wimbledon and US Open. I still remember the days he used to play in denim shorts heh. Yet another tennis great shall move on.

I'm sad already. I've been an Agassi fan for I don't know how long...

For more info : http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/tennis/5113046.stm

A few more awesome matches that were played this year...

1) Kim Clijsters Vs Martina Hingis
2) Paes/Damm Vs Bryan/Bryan (the best ever doubles match I've seen to date I guess)
3) Marcos Baghdatis Vs David Nalbandian

Awesome. Seems that the competition just gets better and better every year. And here's this year's A-Z of the Australian Open.

The really sad bits were the retirements of Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne. And Baghdatis ran out of steam like Safin did when playing Federer.

I think Federer will surpass Sampras if he hasn't already (in terms of overall ability).

January has gone by. Time does fly.

So what if you're at work and missing all the fun of the Australian Open? There's always AO Radio which covers all the important matches live :)

Fire up a console, and hit mplayer -nocache mms://203.89.193.98/ausopen2006 to enjoy live commentary. The -nocache ensures that mplayer doesn't cache the stream...can be pissing off to hear commentary from the first set when the second is going on.

IE/Windows users should be able to listen to it directly, since it's Windows Media Player stream.

In case you've not been following this year Australian Open, you've missed some really good matches...in no specific order:

1) Andy Roddick Vs Marcos Baghdatis
2) Martina Hingis Vs Samantha Stosur
3) Roger Federer Vs Tommy Haas
4) Nicolas Kiefer Vs Sebastien Grosjean
5) Ivan Ljubicic Vs Marcos Baghdatis

And Martina Hingis is playing Kim Clijsters right now. Clijsters won the first set 6-3 and is down 2-5 in the second. Awesome.

PS : Thanks to louiswu and teemus for helping LiveJournal test out their Nudge a friend feature :)

Managed to catch one complete match of the US Open 2005, the year's final Grand Slam.

Sania managed to beat Marie 6-4,1-6,6-4. The first set was all Sania's as she played quite well and went ahead before allowing Marie to catch up and then finally took the set . Then the classic "Indian" syndrome set in. Be it Cricket, Hockey or Tennis, we have that awesome talent of taking defeat from the jaws of victory. So she did just that....lost the second set and then came back quite well in the third to wrap up the match. I guess she had a minor thigh strain of some sort, since she was struggling towards the end but she played out the last 4 games or so very well to take the match.

Let's start with Saturday. Venus Willams made an amazing comeback (as much as I hate to accept it) to win her first title after 2001. The way she went beserk after winning was amazing. Live 8 was truly awesome, and is something that I'll never forget. The cause is really important too and the ads showing how people suffer due to poverty were heart-wrenching. Lots of sleep happened somewhere in between.

Sunday was the Men's final, Federer making short work of Roddick, yet again. Was wonderful to watch. The French GP was nice, after the screw up at Indianapolis, it was nice to see a proper race. Alonso seems to be inching away with the championship.

I just realised that this isn't that long an update, it still is late. Ah well.