Heather Watson sinks Australian home hope Stosur and reveals toll of tour life
ByPA Sport
Published 17/01/2017 at 14:38 GMT
Heather Watson finds peak motivation at the start of the season and she may have scored her best win of 2017 already after dumping Samantha Stosur out of the Australian Open.
Heather Watson had a good win at the Australian Open
Image credit: PA Sport
Watson made it five British players into round two in Melbourne for the first time since 1987 after Kyle Edmund and Johanna Konta also progressed on Tuesday.
Naomi Broady nearly made it six but was edged out by Australian 22nd seed Daria Gavrilova, calling the crowd "pretty harsh" with their bias towards the home player.
Andy Murray and Dan Evans had already won on Monday.
Stosur, seeded 20th here in Melbourne and a local favourite despite having a dismal record at her home tournament, is the highest-ranked opponent, at 21st, that Watson has ever beaten at a grand slam.
In 17 attempts against players in the top 50, this was only her second success, the other coming in a mammoth match against Frenchwoman Caroline Garcia at Wimbledon in 2015.
Watson's 6-3 3-6 6-0 victory also marks a dramatic upturn in form, given she failed to go past the second round of any tournament from June last year and watched her ranking drop from 50th to 81st.
Asked for the cause of the difference, Watson said: "Because I'm fresh. I haven't played matches in a while so I'm motivated. I've had that time off and been at home.
"When it gets hard for me is when I've done too many weeks on the road and all I think about is going home.
"You have those weeks sometimes and you have to tough through them but it's not good when it becomes every single week. I just want to manage that better.
"I need just to listen to my body. I think (the Olympics in) Rio was a big part of it last year. I talked about it a lot, was really looking forward to it, wanted to make it.
"Then I made it and once it was done I was like, 'I just want to go home'. I was dead."
While Watson's match was a nervy affair, twisting one direction and then the other, Edmund's was far more straightforward as he breezed past Colombian Santiago Giraldo 6-2 7-5 6-3.
This time 12 months ago Edmund had wilted in the heat here, crippled by cramp in a five-set defeat to little-known Bosnian Damir Dzumhur.
But another pre-season alongside Murray in Miami, as well as a gruelling personal programme of track sprinting, appears to have done the trick.
"The session we actually do is 18 80-metre sprints," Edmund said. "Then you rest for three minutes, and do another set of 18, that's the session we do.
"Eighty metres doesn't sound like a lot but when you do it over and over again it does get to you."
Edmund will now play Spain's 30th seed Pablo Carreno Busta. The British number two lost their only previous meeting at a Futures event in 2013.
Broady provided more evidence of her excellent progress in the day's final match on Margaret Court Arena but lost out to the Russian-born Australian Gavrilova 3-6 6-4 7-5.
"It helped 'Dasha' a lot having the crowd behind her - when it's such a close match, that makes a big difference," Broady said.
"They were pretty harsh the longer the match went on. They started shouting between first and second serves but I've had way worse so I was prepared for it."
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