Tennis: Black day for exhausted women's top seed

By TERRY MADDAFORD

A houseboat holiday on a distant Zimbabwean lake with her famous tennis-playing brothers and only crocodiles, hippos, lions and elephants for company provided Cara Black with the perfect break and lead-in to the Auckland international tennis tournament.

Three times a semifinalist on the WTA tour, she is now just one win away from her first final after beating ASB Bank Classic top seed Elena Likhovtseva 6-3 7-5 in yesterday's quarter-finals.

Black, a former world No 1 junior in both singles and doubles after winning the 1997 Wimbledon and United States Open singles, has breezed through to the last four without dropping a set.

The pressure is mounting, however.

The only seeded player left in the top half of the draw, sixth-seeded Black cashed in as a tiring Likhovtseva flagged in the 1-hour 28-minute match.

"I had been playing for seven or eight weeks in a row at the end of a long year," 20-year-old Black said. "I went home and took time off. I needed it and came here fresh."

The time spent on Lake Kariba, a man-made lake about four hours' drive from the family's Harare home, with brothers Byron and Wayne, was perfect.

"The animals make you feel so relaxed. It was great," said the youngest member of Zimbabwe's first family of tennis. "No cellphones, primitive conditions and no tennis talk."

Black, ranked 50th in the world - 19 down on her 1998 career-high - and at the start of her third year on the tour is, at 1.67m and 55kg, hardly a giant, but she compensates for her diminutiveness with infinite patience, determination and a handy array of shots.

"I had played Elena twice before so I had a fair idea of what I had to do. I knew she was a bit tired after two three-set [singles and doubles] matches on Wednesday," she said.

"I just tried to stay on top as I knew she had come back from a set down to win her quarter-final."

Black, reluctant to charge the net, played with great composure.

She served only two double-faults - two serves apart in the fifth game of the second set - and served two aces and managed a high first-serve percentage, unlike her 24-year-old opponent, who struggled with her first serve.

After the first six games went with serve, Black had Likhovtseva under pressure in the seventh, forcing the first break-point of the match.

The Russian whipped in a swinging serve. Black scrambled to reach it but angled a great cross-court return just over the net for a crucial winner and 4-3. That became 5-3 and then, with three well-played points, a second break and the set.

The second set was more drawn out, with the Russian broken in the second, fourth and 12th games and Black in the third and fifth.

Black is hoping the year-opening tournament will provide the kick-start she needs to achieve her aim of a top-20 ranking by the time she heads back for some more time in the wild at the end of 2000.