The tennis season is kicking into high gear with most of the major clay tournaments in full swing. Alicante is a haven for clay tennis with several high quality tennis academies and clubs located in our region.
As an example the tennis academy located near the Albufereta Beach has some 40 000 square meters of sports facilities and 21 tennis courts of which 17 are clay courts.
The highlight of the clay season, the 2021 French Open, has been postponed by a week due to the world wide pandemic and is now scheduled to take place from May 24 to June 13. The delay is mostly due to maximize the chances of getting fans in the stands.
With the season’s main clay event only a few weeks away it makes sense to consider the best sources of news and information for clay tennis.
Obviously as tennis is a sport which is somewhat popular in all corners of the world, there is a wide range of websites dedicated to providing tennis news and updates. In this article we will focus on some lesser known sites which still provides top notch tennis content.
WTAcourt is a site dedicated to women’s tennis. It has a lot of news on WTA tennis tournaments, we are looking forward to read their opinions on the women’s side of the French Open.
The WTA French Open this year is very hard to predict. There are several contenders with good chances. The Japanese superstar, Naomi Osaka, won the first grand slam tournament of the year, the 2021 Austalian Open. She has however, never made it past the third round at Roland Garros.
Ashleigh Barty is currently ranked as the world number one and has solid French Open credentials having won in 2019.
Simona Halep is only behind Barty and Osaka in the WTA ratings and won in Paris three years ago in 2018.
Iga Swiatek is only ranked as the 16th in the world, but the 19 year old Pole is an up and coming player and she won the French Open last year.
In addition to the previously named women, Spain’s Garbine Muguruza has decent prospects. Her ability to move and slide on clay makes her well known for her clay-court prowess.
Sportscolumnists focuses on several sports, but we have always found their tennis articles to be of a particularly high standard.
The men’s side seems to be a lot easier to predict than the women’s. Rafael Nadal has been dominant on the clay courts for almost his entire career. He has won the French Open an unprecedented 13 times already, included the four last editions of the tournament. As the only left-handed member of “the big three”, his main strength is his forehand stroke, which he tends to hit with an extreme amount of topspin at difficult angles to return.
Nadal is at the moment an odds-on favourite to win the tournament with the Pinnacle odds being 1.84. Even so it seems a lot of tennis experts think his chances are good enough to justify such a short
