Agnes Szavay

Among the many off-court events held during the Sony Ericsson Championships in Doha, one of the most important was a cheque presentation made at the end-of-season players' party. With Nadia Petrova and Dinara Safina on hand, it was announced that in the course of 2008 the Tour's players had served enough aces at €10 a pop to raise €105,450 (around $132,000) for the international housing charity, Habitat for Humanity.
 

Third seed Agnieszka Radwanska and seventh seed Flavia Pennetta of Italy both claimed straight-set victories at the Linz Open.
 
Poland's Radwanska (pictutred) reached the quarter-finals with a 6-2 6-4 victory over Kaia Kanepi of Estonia, and Pennetta was even more decisive in beating Hungary's Agnes Szavay 6-1 6-2 to reach the second round.
 
Radwanska took advantage of her error-prone opponent, who knew what she had to do but had difficulty in executing.
 

Monica Niculescu overcame a leg injury to upset seventh-seeded Anna Chakvetadze 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 Tuesday in the first round of the Zurich Open.
 
The 21-year-old Romanian qualifier, ranked 66th in the world, won 10 of the final 13 games with her left thigh heavily strapped.
 
Niculescu called for trainer while leading 2-1 in the second set. The delay appeared to affect Chakvetadze's timing - she was broken in her next two service games and trailed 5-1.
 

So there is still a place for cunning in women's tennis! The wily Italian Francesca Schiavone has beaten one of this year's rising stars in the first round of the TENNIS.com Zurich Open, the 28-year-old beating the big-hitting 18-year-old Dane Caroline Wozniacki 7-6 6-2 to set up a meeting with Maria Kirilenko.

Qualifier Kateryna Bondarenko rallied to upset 15th-ranked Flavia Pennetta 4-6, 6-2, 6-1 at the Porsche Grand Prix.
 
The Ukrainian next plays either Venus Williams or Anna-Lena Groenefeld, who played later Tuesday.
 
Another qualifier also advanced when Tsvetana Pironkova beat teenager Alize Cornet 6-2, 6-1. The Bulgarian next plays third-seeded Dinara Safina, who had a bye into the second round, along with the other top three players in the tournament - Serena Williams, Jelena Jankovic and Elena Dementieva.
 

Convenient, good looking and distinctive, the Bluetooth MBW-200 range of Bluetooth watches is an expansion of the highly successful Bluetooth MBW-150 range. Three of the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour's most glamorous young stars helped launch the new product, which has three different sophisticated designs.
 

Defending tournament champion Agnes Szavay was defeated Thursday in second-round action at the $600,000 China Open hard-court tennis tournament in Beijing.
 
Anabel Medina Garrigues had little trouble in eliminating Szavay from this year's event. The win put Medina Garrigues into Friday's quarterfinals against fifth-seeded Vera Zvonareva, who was a 7-6 (7-5), 6-2 winner over Francesca Schiavone in her second-round match Thursday.
 

Eighth-seeded Russian Anna Chakvetadze and reigning champion Agnes Szavay highlighted Tuesday's first- round winners at the $600,000 China Open.

Chakvetadze got past Czech lucky-loser Iveta Benesova 6-4, 7-5, while an unseeded Szavay zipped past qualifier Yaroslava Shvedova of Kazakhstan 6-4, 6-3 on the hardcourts at Beijing Tennis Center. The Hungarian Szavay upset Serbian star Jelena Jankovic in last year's title match here.

The difficulties continued for Daniela Hantuchova and Anna Chakvetadze on Tuesday as both players were upset in the first round of the Pacific Open in Tokyo.
 
The seventh-seeded Hantuchova was defeated 6-1 7-5 by Italy's Francesca Schiavone while Chakvetadze, the eighth seed, lost 6-4 3-6 6-3 to Estonian qualifier Kaia Kanepi.
 
Sixth seed Agnieszka Radwanska posted a decisive 6-1 6-4 victory over wild card Aiko Nakamura of Japan in their first-round match.
 

For many reasons, 2008 was a season that went against convention. Would you have guessed that, heading into the US Open, Roger Federer and Justine Henin would have no Grand Slam titles between them? It’s been a very interesting year, no matter which player you support.
 
Typically, the four Grand Slam tournaments have a way of revealing everything in tennis, and that happened again this year, for better or worse:
 
The Best…