Elena Baltacha stuns Kateryna Bondarenko to reach third round

If Elena Baltacha is never going to be known for her Zen approach to tennis, the Scot turned in a performance of great calm and composure at the Australian Open as she defeated a top-32 opponent for the first time in her career.

Baltacha's victory over Ukraine’s Kateryna Bondarenko propelled her into the third round of the Australian Open, matching her longest run at the grand slam tournaments. Baltacha will next play Dinara Safina, Russia’s world No 2, Marat Safin’s not-so-little sister and the runner-up to Serena Williams last season.

If you were to compile a list of the players who use the most nervous energy on court, probably the only person who would come out above Baltacha would be Lleyton Hewitt, the king of the fist-pumps and a man who once tried to register ‘C’mon’ as a trademark.

Barbra Streisand famously described Andre Agassi as a “Zen master”; no one is ever going to say that about this Scottish tennis player. On Baltacha’s first appearance of this tournament, against France’s Pauline Parmentier, she was so over-wrought and over-emotional, so worried about achieving the win that would keep her in the top 100, that she got cramp.

This time, everything was smoother, calmer. There wasn’t the same tension in her body, and she dealt with a poor start to the second set by coming through to win in straight sets, 6-2, 7-5.

Almost everything went Baltacha’s way in the opening set, even down to the shots that struck the white tape at the top of the net and dribbled over on to Bondarenko’s side of the court.

Plus Baltacha had a plan - attacking her opponent’s forehand - and she was sticking to it. The unseeded world No 87 even tried to intimidate her opponent by stepping in to return serve, a clear threat that she intended to “clobber” the ball back. The only poor period of the match was at the beginning of the second set, when she was 0-3 down, but she steadied herself.

For Baltacha, this was a second victory at the slams over one of the Bondarenkos, Ukraine’s answer to the Williams sisters, as she beat Alona Bondarenko in the first round of last summer’s Wimbledon. Though Baltacha was also born in Kiev, she has lived in Britain for most of her life after her father Sergei, a footballer, moved to Ipswich Town in the 1980s.

This is the third time that Baltacha has reached the last 32 of a slam. She did it for the first time as a wild card at the 2002 Wimbledon Championships, and again at the 2005 Australian Open, having progressed through the qualifying rounds.

When Safina played a British girl in the first round of last season’s French Open she achieved a ‘double bagel’ win, beating Anne Keothavong 6-0, 6-0. Though this was a pleasing win, no one was getting too carried away at Melbourne Park, or at least they shouldn’t have been.