Third seed Victoria Azarenka, angered at dropping a game in her first round match, had a prime time audience and an Australian opponent when she appeared on Rod Laver Arena after Tomic's success. Determined to spoil the happy Australian sentiment, and Casey Dellacqua's Australian Open dream, Vika wasted little time before making Casey's dream a complete nightmare.
The Australian held serve in the opening game - the positives ended there.
The first set lasted about as long as the hit-up prior to the match start, with Azarenka mistakes as difficult to find as the proverbial needle. Casey's best shots equated to Vika's standard stock shots. Whenever Azarenka played near her best tennis, nothing within Casey's bag of tricks had the ability with which to answer. 6-1 Azarenka
Any slight glimmer of hope that Dellacqua may hold serve more than once, or put some sort of pressure on the Azarenka serve, was immediately and cold-heartedly snuffed out by the class of the Belarusian. This Azarenka performance did not reach the dizzy heights that she will require to threaten the championship, but it did the job without fuss, and empathised the areas where Casey needs to concentrate in order for her game and ranking to return to its pre-injury level.
6-1 6-0, and to Casey's credit never once did she drop her head - she understands fully where she is in her comeback to top tennis, and a second round loss to a player of Vika's calibre is part of the journey.
The journey for Vika will finish in the final in my opinion - I always felt that she was the standout player in the top half of the draw, and her performances in rounds one and two change nothing about that.
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