Sharapova ‘nervous’ over comeback

The print-out arrived at around 4pm Tuesday (NZT 2am Wednesday). Just a standard order of play but with one notable detail. There in the middle: ‘‘Not before 6.30pm (WC) Maria Sharapova (Rus) v Roberta Vinci (Ita).’’

Yes, the 15-month wait is over. Sharapova will play tour-level tennis again. As her supporters emphasise, she has served her sentence, and hardly a lenient one. Even so, those two letters, WC, continue to cause unrest.

By being granted a wild card in Stuttgart and others in Madrid and Rome, Sharapova has tilted the court of locker-room opinion against herself.

The trouble is, every spot that Sharapova occupies means that someone else misses out. Here in Stuttgart, the unfortunate woman is Julia Goerges, the German No 2.

‘‘I am really sad for Julia, because she won the tournament already and she is a German,’’ said the top seed and world No 2, Angelique Kerber, yesterday.

‘‘So of course I was wishing that she would get the wild card.’’

Vinci, the woman on the other side of the net for the big occasion, is understood to feel similar sympathy for her fellow Italian, Francesca Schiavone, who seems destined to play the fall woman in Rome.

For a woman with an entourage of managers and publicists, Sharapova has hardly delivered a Dale Carnegie-style demonstration of how to win friends and influence people.

Back in March of last year, the initial response from the tennis world when she revealed she had failed a drugs test for meldonium was surprisingly positive.

American pros Madison Keys and Jamie Hampton referred to her ‘‘honest mistake’’, while even Serena Williams, a bitter rival, saluted Sharapova’s ‘‘courage’’ in making the announcement herself.

Just over a year later, the use of meldonium is no longer the primary issue. But a new sense of discontent has grown up around the red-carpet ride provided by those wild cards. The same goes for Sharapova’s presence in a main draw which began on Monday, two days before her ban elapsed.

You can see why it happened. Stuttgart’s full title is the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, and Porsche is one of Sharapova’s main sponsors. In a sport that fights for every scrap of commercial visibility, the attraction was too good to refuse.

Unfortunately, Sharapova was not allowed on to the site until yesterday morning, and had to spend recent days practising at Sportverein Sillenbuch, a private club situated six miles away.

The arrangement is so uncomfortable that even Johanna Konta, the publicity-shy British No 1, referred to it as a ‘‘massive grey area’’, adding: ‘‘This situation has highlighted a lot of things that need clarity.’’

And then there was the aboutturn performed by Simona Halep, the world No 5. Six weeks ago, Halep blithely acknowledged Sharapova’s right to wild cards on the basis that ‘‘she was No 1 and a champion’’.

Yesterday, the same question elicited a very different answer. ‘‘For the kids, for the young players, it’s not OK to help players who have been banned for doping with wild cards.’’

Could this shift be connected to the recent outburst from Sharapova’s long-serving agent, Max Eisenbud? On Friday, apparently driven to breaking point by the parade of negative comments, Eisenbud sent an unsolicited message to American tennis writer Ben Rothenberg.

‘‘All these ‘journeyman’ players like Radwanska and Wozniacki who have never won a slam, and the next generation passing them, they are smart to try to keep Maria out of Paris,’’ he wrote.

‘‘No Serena [Williams], no Maria, no Vika [Azarenka], no Petra [Kvitova], it’s their last chance to win a slam. But they never read the CAS [Court of Arbitration for Sport] report and they never read paragraph 100 and 101 [in which the panel ruled that Sharapova was an accidental doper]. So they have no clue.’’

For another misstep, we could point to the triumphalist tone struck after the CAS reduced the sentence from 24 months to 15. Sharapova’s lawyer, John Haggerty, called it ‘‘a stunning repudiation’’ of the International Tennis Federation, while Sharapova herself set off in a determined attempt to occupy the moral high ground. In response, former world No 3 Pam Shriver tweeted: ‘‘Why not just be grateful?’’

Will any of this bother her, or in the coming weeks?

‘‘She is nervous about the reaction to her comeback,’’ said one source who knows her well.

A long as the fans greet her warmly, one suspects that she will cope with the stand-offishness of her peers. It is not as if she has ever shown much warmth in the opposite direction.

- The Daily Telegraph Thompson the title and generated criticism of the sport for a fan’s ability to intervene so late in the piece.

The new law enables officials to eliminate penalties if they feel players made a ‘‘reasonable judgment’’ in taking a drop or replacing their golf ball on the putting green.

‘‘We’re all responsible for applying rules and calling penalties on ourselves,’’ USGA senior director of rules Thomas Pagel said.

‘‘But we’ve seen situations where there is no way the player