At the Toray Pan Pacific Open, both Serena Williams and Dinara Safina have been bounced out and go back home earlier than expected. This caps off a rather disappointing year for all of them, because during a large part of the season, it has been the secondary players and such that haven’t been able to win out as much as they had previously expected. The top players have been hoping to cement their situation quite a bit and these players haven’t been able to do it. In her first year as #1, Safina has been rather unimpressive. Williams hasn’t been able to decisively take herself back to the top of the world rankings. Several other talented players are going forward now to the 3rd round of the tournament and we’ll see what happens.

When Britain takes on Lithuania during the first round of the Davis Cup, it certainly looks like they will just be playing for show. Lithuania only has a fraction of the budget that the British team has and they don’t have as long a tradition of tennis either. But Lithuania has a lot of heart and is ready to challenge that team to the hilt. They will also be on something like home turf when they go head-to-head. Hopefully, they will at least make an interesting match of it. It’s always more fun to watch these matches when they are more evenly matched, whether through a trick or through normal talent.

The Czech Republic’s Davis Cup team is coming to the Davis Cup final for the first time, after 29 years of trying. The court was a scene of craziness after they put the Croatians away this weekend. This is a proud moment for fans in places like Prague and other parts of Bohemia. They will most likely head to Spain for the final in December, against a Spanish team that has won several times in the last few years. Spain will probably not be complacent enough to make it easy for the Czechs. But it’s a big accomplishment for this team and even appearing in the final will be a big excitement this time around! If they win, it’s hard to imagine how excited they’ll be!

Andy Murray will be playing in the Davis Cup coming up. He is one of the best players in the world with Federer and Nadal just ahead of him. It seems like Murray has won more tournaments this year, but that’s probably not true. He was injured towards the end of his run in the US Open, with some kind of wrist injury. This was going to be the place where he had the chance to actually win it, but he wasn’t at 100% and got bumped in the 4th round. But the British Davis Cup team is counting on him to win games during the relegation tournament against Poland that’s coming up soon. But he says that he’s going to be completely ready for the tournament, so it’ll be great to see the competition brought up to that level by his presence.

Serena Williams was excited to see a win this weekend in the quarterfinals of the US Open. But sadly, she had a few bad moments, and got frustrated at an official on the court. She was docked a point. The only problem was that it was the match point. She lost to Wozniacki for it, so she can think about that for a little while. Meanwhile, Juan Del Potro ended up beating out Federer in the men’s final. It was an unfortunate moment for Federer, who thought he had it wrapped up, being only a couple of points from winning the match earlier and then frittering away the lead with less-than-stellar serving. It was rather shocking for him too, because he didn’t get beat by Nadal or Murray or any of those. It was a 6th seed. An exciting weekend of tennis for everyone, we have to say.

Caroline Wozniacki finally put a stop to Melanie Oudin’s big winning streak in the US Open. I had planned to bring up the men’s side of the competition today, but since the Oudin thing has dominated our news of tennis for more than a week, we’re going to talk about the end of it. Wozniacki was able to take out Oudin by stopping her from making the kind of comeback that she had made in all of the previous moves. Oudin kept fighting back and it was a really tough match for everyone in it. But in the end, Oudin couldn’t catch up again. These two players are still some of the best in the world and the US Open will go down in history as one of the most exciting yet! And it’s not even over yet.

Dinara Safina, despite several recent smaller wins in the weeks leading up to the US Open, has been dropped in the 3rd round of the tournament. Petra Kvitova was just too good for her, it seems and this also brings us to an important point about Safina. She seems to have a lot of trouble playing hard in the big tournaments. Having watched her a few times, she seems to play lackadaisically for the first part of a match. Sometimes she will jump right back up and take it back. But often she just sort of fades. With 9 double faults in this match, there’s not much that could be done to help her. This also adds to the number of top ranked players that have been dropped at Flushing Meadows this week on the women’s side. The planets are aligned or something, it seems.

The US Open has had some big shockers this weekend. Especially amongst the women have been a lot of winners who weren’t expected to win anything at all. Venus Williams Melanie Oudin has had a really big tournament too, beating Dementieva, Sharapova and Petrova over the course of just a few days. She did kind of the same thing at Wimbledon, winning four matches against formidable opponents. It will only take awhile for these players to realize how to beat her. But the trick seems to be that once she’s down, she starts really fighting back, getting back in the game and making them almost regret having been ahead in the first place. She’s doing almost none of it on free points like aces. She’s having a really big run so it will be very exciting to see that this young lady and some of the other females are going to make big differences in the way this particular leaderboard is going to look.