Wozniacki still in Serena's shadow

London: Since Wimbledon, Caroline Wozniacki has been on the tour, while Serena Williams has been on Oprah, on the shopping channels selling her clothes and her lip-glosses, on the front row at London Fashion Week, and on the sands of Miami's beaches.

Regardless of what the ranking computer says after Wozniacki became the world No 1 for the first time, the injured Williams will continue to regard herself as the best female tennis player on the planet, and who would disagree?

It was somehow appropriate, but also perhaps a touch unfortunate for Wozniacki and for women's tennis as a whole, that her elevation to the top spot came through an early round victory over an unremarkable Czech opponent, Petra Kvitova, to reach the quarter-finals of the China Open in Beijing, which is not exactly a tournament that she would have dreamt of winning while she was a young girl learning the game. She later went on to win the event, defeating Russian Vera Zvonareva in the final carried over to Monday.

Big difference

"I think just everything is working for me at the moment. I've got to believe I can beat anyone, and I feel in great shape. I feel that I've improved a lot of small things. It just has made a big difference," Wozniacki said.

Wozniacki, this year's champion at Ponte Vedra Beach, Copenhagen, Montreal, New Haven and Tokyo, is most dependable at the B-list events, when the wider sporting world is looking the other way.

No one is saying that this is her fault, but this further devalues the No 1 ranking, as she is the third woman in the past couple of years to go to the top of the leaderboard without having held one of the grand slam trophies, following Serbia's Jelena Jankovic and Russia's Dinara Safina. Wozniacki did not even feature in a slam final this season.

Until Wozniacki wins a slam, she will be regarded as one of the ‘inbetweeners', one of those who stood in while Williams resolved problems with injury or motivation.

So it was not in Melbourne, Paris, London or New York, but on the centre court in Beijing, just after Britain's Andy Murray had beaten Spain's Albert Montanes in straight sets to go through to play Croatia's Ivan Ljubicic in the quarter-finals of the men's tournament, that women's tennis found its new No 1.

In 2011, the Dane said her focus would be on winning a Grand Slam title. "In a Grand Slam, you have to win seven matches in a row, and that's not easy. I've been close. Next year I will have that as a goal... if it doesn't happen next year, I'm still young," she told reporters.