Sharapova ousted from the Pacific Life Open Tournament

Reigning women champion, Maria Sharapova was knocked out of the $2.1 million Pacific Life Open on Tuesday, after a 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 loss to Vera Zvonareva in the fourth round. The game was played at the wonderful Indian Wells Tennis garden.

With this loss of Sharapova she has to hand down her number 1 position to the French open champion Justine Henin Hardene from Belgium.

During the start of the match Sharapova managed to win the first set with ease. In the second round too, she was going pretty fine and had a lead. But suddenly the 15th seeded Zvonareva started firing from all her cylinders and made a tremendous come back in the game, by winning the last two sets very easily.

With the help of 6 aces it took Zvonareva 2 hours and 12 minutes to wrap up the game. She managed to break Sharapova’s serve eight times. Sharapova made the disastrous 13 double faults in the game.

This time Pacific Life Open seems to be a tournament of some mighty upsets. Earlier in the tournament Roger Fedrer’s winning spree came to a halt when he lost to qualifier Guillermo Canas of Argentina in the sets 7-5, 6-2. Then Sharapova losing to Zvonareva and later that day third seeded Martina Hingis was ousted by Daniela Hantuchova 6-4, 6-3.

Daniela Hantuchova has already beaten Hingis in 2002 final of the Indian Wells.

Russia’s fourth seeded Nadia Petrova was retired into the second set of her match with France’s Tatiana Golovin. The later automatically advanced to the next round.

The trend of upsets was stopped when the second seed Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova knocked out Japan’s Ai Sugiyama in the straight sets 6-2, 6-2.

According to Sharapova she was not completely well. She felt a little bit of pain in her shoulder and rib, which hampered her performance in the game.