Top seed Flavia Pennetta was stunned today with a first round 6-1, 7-5 loss at the Internazionali Femminili di Palermo by Germany’s Julia Schruff.
Flavia Pennetta has three Sony Ericsson WTA Tour singles titles, and she has been steadily creeping up the tennis rankings in both singles and doubles. She reached a career high of No. 16 in January, but has since slipped down to No. 18.
She did an excellent job by helping Italy reach the finals of Fed Cup last weekend, but her performance today failed to thrill her home crowd in Palermo, Italy. Obviously she could be suffering from fatigue after Fed Cup, but it still is pretty bad for the top seed of a Tier IV event, especially someone ranked in the top-twenty, to crash out in the first round.
Julia Schruff will play another Italian, Romina Oprandi, in the second round.
Hi. I just wanted to say that Flavia Pennetta has 3 Sony Ericsson WTA Tour singles titles to her name, all on clay. Perhaps you’re thinking of her Fed Cup teammate, Francesca Schiavone, who currently has no singles titles, but Flavia’s been in at least 2 finals this year and has won 3 singles titles thus far in her career.
momofan – thanks so much for noticing that . . . I was looking at her year-to-date stats instead of the career.
One other thing that I found interesting about Pennetta’s career – she is most successful on clay, yet her favorite surface is hardcourts.
And here’s another interesting tidbit about Flavor Flav: her best GS showing has been 4th round at Wimbledon, on grass, for the past two years in a row. She even took a 6-3 set off Maria S. at Wimbly this year in the 4th round.
Amazing – you would think that she would be more solid at RG, yet she’s never made it past the 3rd round. I’m looking forward to watching her compete during the summer hardcourt season; she’s been very consistent in the past, and maybe this is her year to go pretty deep in the draw.