[Progniusis]

(good report on Nancy from today's NY Times. OBVIOUSLY, her dropping first round in Madrid requires a few of the gleam away, but still...) Carla Suarez Navarro Provides Italy Wish in Women's Football Published: Might 9, 2009 With Rafael Nadal running the world's baselines, this can be a golden age of Spanish football. But that only pertains to the Spanish men. Their peak was reached by the women greater than a decade before when Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Conchita Martinez were frequently demanding for and winning important titles. Suarez Navarro, rated 23rd, is 1 of 2 leading 40 women to utilize a one-handed backhand. There's been no indication of an authentic heir, and it's now been eight years since a Spanish girl achieved the semifinals of a Slam event in singles. It's an astonishing situation. Spanish activities continue to be on a Nadal, the national men's team, the baseball star Pau Gasol. Although women's participation in activities lags behind men's in Spain, the gap is narrowing, with the escalation in the amount of Spanish female Olympians for example. Football is in the middle of a growth and Nadal may be the solid expansion of an extended type of exceptional Spanish men's people, including Carlos Moya, who also reached No. 1 in the planet after understanding the overall game on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. But Sanchez Vicario and Martinez and all of the attention they received to women's football in Spain didn't set the dining table for another women's success. At the very least perhaps not yet. 'We are giving everything we have,' Carla Suarez Navarro said. Suarez Navarro, 20, is Spain's most encouraging participant because the Big 2, and she holds a particular similarity to both. Like Sanchez Vicario, Suarez Navarro is small and strong and dependent on pace to counter the ability of her higher competitors. Like Martinez, she's a fashionable one-handed backhand that came naturally. 'Her backhand is her most useful shot; it tells me a little of Justine Henin's,' Sanchez Vicario said while having a break a week ago from looking after her 2-month-old child, Arantxa. 'She isn't high, but she's really gifted. For me personally, she's the only real younger women's participant in Spain who are able to actually accomplish a great deal more. She wants more regularity, but we'll observe how much she could possibly get. To date, she she may have it what it takes is alone who looks. I wish I could see more titles.' With Henin, the former Belgian celebrity, today outdated, the 23rd-ranked Suarez Navarro and 21st-ranked Amelie Mauresmo would be the only people in the most truly effective 40 who make use of a one-handed backhand. It enables Suarez Navarro to create the type of changes in tempo and spin including quality fall pictures which are all too rare in top of the reaches of the women's sport in this power-hungry period. 'Whenever I complete a fit, people usually show up to me and keep in touch with me about my backhand and perhaps thank me for my backhand,' Suarez Navarro said. 'My first instructor, Alfonso Perez, had a backhand, and therefore did his cousin. And they taught me this way, and because I'd the power to complete it, I suppose they never tried to alter it.' Like Nadal, Suarez Navarro spent my youth on a island, but her house was significantly further south. Where her mom, Lali, was a education tennis wasn't included by teacher expertise, she was raised and born on the Atlantic Ocean chain of the Canary Islands in the town of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. 'Neither my mother or my dad played,' Suarez Navarro said. 'Nobody in my own family performed. I suppose it had been designed to be for me personally .' Sleep of article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/sp.../10tennis.html