{"id":9958,"date":"2013-01-14T15:57:34","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T05:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=9958"},"modified":"2013-01-14T16:01:22","modified_gmt":"2013-01-14T06:01:22","slug":"the-brisbane-open-201213","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=9958","title":{"rendered":"The Brisbane Open 2012\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When it comes to tennis, I’ve been a pretty longtime casual fan of the sport.\u00a0 I’ve never really followed it as closely as I do with my local football or rugby teams but if there’s a major open on the telly, I’ll usually tune in and check it out.\u00a0 At the start of the New Year, I had a chance to watch the event live for the first time.\u00a0 The Brisbane Open is an event that is slowly growing in prominence on the tennis calendar as more and more big name players opt to use this as a lead-in to the Melbourne Open, the first major tournament of the year.\u00a0 In this most recent iteration, 8 out of the top 10 women seeds were playing and the mens draw included Lleyton Hewitt, Marcus Baghdatis and Andy Murray.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting watching a new sport live for the first time and learning everything from scratch:\u00a0 the ticket buying process, what food and drink is available, what rules the grounds have and so on.\u00a0 Turns out you don’t get to find out the draw for a given day until 7pm the previous night.\u00a0 We patiently waited until we got a favourable draw and we got it on the second night of the New Year – a double header featuring both Andy Murray and Serena Williams – two of the biggest names in the competition.<\/p>\n

I really enjoyed the experience.\u00a0 The Pat Rafter Arena is excellent.\u00a0 It’s so small and compact that there isn’t really a bad seat in the house.\u00a0 We had an excellent view of the court that was elevated sufficiently that you could appreciate the full range and depth of the shots that were played.<\/p>\n

Serena Williams, a veteran who has now dominated the sport for nearly fourteen years played against up-and-coming young American Sloane Stephens.\u00a0 Serena closed out the game 6-4, 6-3 in a tightly contested affair where Williams won each set by holding her serve and breaking Stephens’ just once.\u00a0 It was interesting to watch Serena on the court.\u00a0 I never much liked her on tv.\u00a0 Not since she made her debut on the tennis circuit by destroying Martina Hingis in the late Nineties who was a big favourite of mine.\u00a0 Watching Serena live has warmed me to her a lot.\u00a0 She has a unique build for a female athlete with thick, muscular tree-trunk legs and a heavyset top capped with a gigantic afro.\u00a0 And yet she is formidable combination of power and speed, firing off first serves at over 200kmh (rivaling the men) and still effortlessly makes her way around the court, with age having little to no effect on her cardio.\u00a0 Best of all, she seems to have a sense of humour about it all and delivered a funny post-game interview.\u00a0 I can’t imagine doing that.\u00a0 I’d be too knackered to try and think of anything witty.<\/p>\n

The main event of the evening was Andy Murray, currently ranked 3rd in the world, playing against local Brisbane boy Andy Millman, who is ranked 199.\u00a0 Murray is that rare breed of sports star – a Scottish world champion – so it was a real pleasure to watch the tennis with my mum and dad who were some of the most vocal supporters of Andy that night.\u00a0 I know in Malaysia, my parents have spent many sleepless nights keeping up with Andy over the years and although it almost always ends in disappointment, Murray is coming off a fantastic second half of 2012 where he won Olympic gold against Roger Federer and then went on to win his maiden US Open title.<\/p>\n

Murray won his game in a surprisingly contested 6-1, 5-7, 6-3 win.\u00a0 Murray made short work of Millman in the first set and put on a world class performance, landing inch-perfect lob shots with unnerving precision.\u00a0 If Millman’s gameplan was to play a serve and volley game, Murray killed that idea dead in the water when he landed about five perfect lob shots that kept dipping and landing just short of the baseline.\u00a0 Murray threatened to run Millman ragged and after a rally ended with Millman falling over his feet, it looked to be a short night for the Scot.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t to be.\u00a0 In the second set, Millman overcame his stage fright and rallied back strongly.\u00a0 Whereas in the first set, he received sympathetic applause for winning a single game, he brought the stadium to their feet in the second when he broke Murray’s serve.\u00a0 He would go on to do it a second time and after a lengthy second set, he would go on to win it 7-5.\u00a0 In the final set, Murray hit a fifth gear, drastically cutting down his unforced errors and taking the game to Millman.<\/p>\n

It was an entertaining game to watch.\u00a0 I couldn’t help but root for Millman who was such a huge underdog but I was happy to see Murray win in the end.\u00a0 As a live spectacle, tennis is pretty a-okay by me.\u00a0 Its a sport where I have great admiration for what the players can do.\u00a0 When I watch rugby or football, I occasionally think ‘I could’ve scored that’ or ‘I could’ve kicked that’ but with tennis, I don’t think I could return serve from an Andy Murray 210kmh first serve if my life depended on it.<\/p>\n

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When it comes to tennis, I’ve been a pretty longtime casual fan of the sport.\u00a0 I’ve never really followed it as closely as I do with my local football or rugby teams but if there’s a major open on the telly, I’ll usually tune in and check it out.\u00a0 At the start of the New …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1483,1484,1482],"class_list":["post-9958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-andy-murray","tag-selena-williams","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9958"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9966,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9958\/revisions\/9966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}