Sony Ericsson Tour Championships Futures: Safina odds to win

Doha, Qatar – Dinara Safina regained her No.1 ranking just in time for the season-ending Tour Championships but it is the recently deposed WTA queen, world No.2 Serena Williams that comes into the tournament as the No.1 favourite to win outright in the market. The market is not done snubbing Safina on that score, but goes further in snubbing her by pushing her into the back of the queue, behind five other players vying for the title.

Dinara Safina enters the Doha futures market listed at +900 to win outright at BetOnline Sportsbook. She is behind, top favourite Serena (+200), Svetlana Kuznetsova (+500), Venus and Jelena Jankovic (both at +600) and Elena Dementieva (+650). She also has to suffer the ignominy of sharing her mark with Doha debutant Caroline Wozniacki.

On the season proper, Safina has been the top player on the tour but her mental brain cramps, mostly on the Grand Slam stage have taken the shine off her and cost her the due esteem amongst not only tennis analysts and experts but even amongst some of her peers. Hence her discouraging odds in the futures market.

It also didn’t help Safina’s cause that in her debut last year she lost all three round robin matches. She has come a bit of a way since then however and opening a better account this time around in Doha is not entirely out of the realm of her abilities.

Certainly, she has the game to do so. You don’t go holding the No.1 ranking for 25 consecutive weeks, totting up a tally of 55-15 on the season and winning three titles –Rome, Madrid and Portoroz – just like that. But it is her losses that most remember her for this season.

She lost some matches, and some quite badly. Happens. That she capitulated in several finals this season shouldn’t blind tennis bettors from the reality that she has the quality to reach a final, even a major final come to that – runner-up highlights: Sydney, Aussie Open, Stuttgart, French Open and Cincinnati.

The breakdowns however do put forward an undeniably sensational testimony against her. The worst testifiers are the 6-0, 6-3 loss to Serena at the Aussie Open final and the 6-1, 6-0 loss to Venus Williams at the Wimbledon semis.

Well, good news for Safina is she will not have to worry about the Williamses until possibly the knockout stages.

Safina falls into a remarkably favourable group in Doha with debutants Victoria Azarenka and Caroline Wozniacki in the mix and from which she really should emerge into the semis. Because not only are these two teenagers making their debut at this event but also they have been running out of steam in these dying months of the WTA season and are after suffering losses to non-Doha calibre talent. Wozniacki is even after withdrawing from her opening round match in Linz, down 5-7, 0-5 and in visible distress.

If the tennis odds were an indication,  the fact that the market tips Azarenka the longest in the market should tell tennis bettors everything they need to know about her and correctly throw her out of the equation.  

That Wozniacki is tipped equally as Safina on the market to take the season-ending honours is a grievous error in my opinion, and totally misleading. Safina should really be short to Wozniacki at this point in the proceedings. The beauty of  markets is that they inevitably correct themselves once the tournament gets underway.

Safina’s only real threat in this group is Jelena Jankovic (+600 to win outright) but there are two spots for the taking in each group so the pair should combine for the one-two punch and worry about the rest later.

White Group Prediction: Safina and Dementieva move into the semis.

In terms of the knockout rounds, I am going to go on record and say Safina can go all the way. We have her latest assurance that she no longer cares about what her detractors say. This is good news because clearly, the pressure to underscore her No.1 ranking throughout the year with a Grand Slam title and silence her critics got to her. When Serena finally overtook Safina in the rankings in Beijing, many, including Safina, saw it as a blessed relief. [Side note: what are we then to make of her, Serena, failing to hold on to it for more than a couple of weeks. Just asking. ]

If Safina enters this tournament without taking on the pressure of what everyone else expects her to do as the top ranked player, she might just do what she wants to do,  prove that SHE really is the No.1 player. Which happens to be the very same as what everyone wanted her to do before but now they have all but written her off so she would be doing it on her own terms.

So the tipping question: is Safina held, as she is now, as an underdog in Doha going to be the best thing for her and play favourably into her mental state? Yes. Wait and see.
Remember, you heard it here first at BetOnline (really hope I don’t have to chew my words come Sunday!)