Grand ambitions for Wozniacki and Halep
SIMONA Halep and Caroline Wozniacki are members of a small club of players to have been world No 1 without winning a Grand Slam. one of them will be very happy to leave the club tomorrow when the top two seeds contest the women’s final of the Australian open, with the victor asserting themselves as the current No 1. Halep hauled herself through an outstanding semi-final when she saved two match points before beating Angelique Kerber 6-3, 4-6, 9-7. Wozniacki earlier snuffed out the challenge of the talented Belgian Elise Mertens with a 6-3, 7-6 victory. In the second round she was 51 down in the third set against Jana Fett of Croatia and has made the most of her second life. Scotland’s Aidan McHugh, a 17-year-old from Glasgow, was today contesting the semi-finals of the junior Australian open. Appropriately enough, given the events of this fortnight, he is the first male GB player to reach this stage of a junior Slam since Kyle Edmund at Wimbledon 2013. McHugh brushed aside Australia’s Rinky Hijikata 6-2, 6-4 in their quarter-final and was due to meet the sixth seed, Taipei’s Chun Hsin Tseung. The teenager made a brief appearance at the Andy Murray-Roger Federer charity exhibition in Glasgow in November, when Murray offered him his racket to play a few points versus the Swiss maestro. McHugh said: ‘I did tell him that I would get him next time. I will need to do well quickly if I’m going to get a chance to play him, unless he is still going at 50.’ France’s Alize Cornet, the 28-yearold world No 42, faces a two-year ban for missing three unannounced visits from drug testers in the last year. She faces an investigation under the ‘whereabouts’ rule.