Australians Battlefor Idol Status

The Age

Friday January 20, 2006

By JAKE NIALL

WITH no Alicia Molik, Mark Philippoussis gone in every sense and no teenage Tontos bursting forth to support Lleyton's Lone Ranger, unheralded, unsponsored Samantha Stosur, Peter Luczak and Nathan Healey yesterday completed successful auditions for the position of Australian idol.

The Australian Open had a vacancy for an enterprising Aussie who was prepared to defy the rankings and progress into the third round, broadening local interest and keeping the doubles safe from the Fanatics.

The surprise was that there were three successful applicants: a 21-year-old Gold Coast woman who plays old-style Aussie tennis, a ponytailed 26-year-old Melbourne man who prefers clay and a 25-year-old Gosford-reared former doubles trundler who rivalled Lleyton Hewitt as a junior.

Stosur was the first to audition for the idol position on Rod Laver Arena, against Ana Ivanovic, a Croatian teen with family in Melbourne whom we would surely have claimed as "Aussie Ana" had she knocked Stosur out.

Luczak followed and, like Stosur, knocked off a seeded European baseliner, Belgian Olivier Rochus, to secure his best paycheck and clear-cut career highlight to date. But whereas Stosur had an authoritative 6-3, 7-5 score, Luczak required five sets and more than three hours to see off Rochus 6-7 (4-7), 6-4, 6-1, 6-7 (1-7), 6-1, his Percy Cerutty-style sand dune workouts at Portsea hitting pay dirt in the fifth set.

Luczak had never beaten a seed before in a grand slam event, Stosur had never won a match on Rod Laver Arena. Healey had never won much anywhere - he had never been higher than No. 242 in singles - but the vagaries of the draw delivered him a winnable assignment, Amer Delic, a 196-centimetre American giraffe who had never won much of note, either. Healey won 6-4, 6-7 (4-7), 6-3, 6-4.

While Stosur entered the tournament as the highest-ranked Australian woman - tantamount to being the best skier in the Congo these days - she carried little of the hype or hope that surrounded Molik last year. Stosur is ranked an unflattering No. 98, having fallen from the low 60s last week, compared with Ivanovic's No. 22.

Stosur is an exception to the norms of women's tennis. She is a late developer in a sport where the better women usually begin marking out territory in their teens. One of the reasons Stosur is coming on now, at 21, instead of 18, is her anachronistic game style: she serves and volleys.

"It just seems that in Australia, we all develop a little bit later," Stosur said yesterday. "You don't want to be thinking that it's not going to happen if you haven't made the top 30 by the time you're 16 or 17."

Stosur says if grass suits her best, "this one's going all right as well". She might as well seize the moment, given that her next opponent will be Austrian Sybille Bammer, who in 10 years as a professional had never been beyond the first round of a grand slam event until now. "I'm sure she's going to get far through the tournament," Ivanovic said of Stosur.

The Australian's aggressive net-rushing was so effective against Ivanovic's backcourt slugging that one wondered why the endangered frontcourt player was so outnumbered by the clones.

Stosur wasn't charging to the net after every serve, but she did get there 38 times in the course of her victory, succeeding on more than two-thirds of those expeditions. "I'm starting to get the confidence to actually do it in matches, not just on the practice court," Stosur said of her advances.

Luczak relied on a self-belief of a different kind. That, in the middle of a brutal afternoon sun, his rigorous conditioning would outlast the cunning Rochus.

Luczak had been a victim of fatigue when he lost in five sets to Thomas Johansson, the 2002 Open champion, in the first round here last year. He told himself, "There's no way this is going to be happening again", and the Johansson defeat propelled his fitness regime.

"Every time I did sand dunes or gym, whatever, just that memory, I'd go, 'If I get into that situation again, it's not going to happen'."

Luczak is going to need all of that fitness - his next opponent, Tommy Haas, won 6-0, 6-1, 6-2 last night, and with Federer looms as the Open's in-form man.

© 2006 The Age

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