Serena, Venus win Rome openers

Tennis Betting Lines

05/04/2010 - Rome, Italy (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Serena Williams, playing her first tennis since capturing the Australian Open back in January, and her big sister Venus were among Tuesday's second-round winners at the $2 million Italian Masters, a clay-court French Open tune-up.

The top-seeded/world No. 1 Serena started off slow before getting her game together to beat Swiss Timea Bacsinszky 7-6 (7-2), 6-1, while a fourth-seeded Venus leveled Swiss veteran Patty Schnyder 6-2, 6-2 on Day 3 at Foro Italico. Schnyder was finalist here five years ago.

The 2002 Rome champion Serena moved on in 1 hour, 38 minutes, while Venus needed 1 hour, 14 minutes to reach the third round, which will be staged here on Wednesday. The former No. 1 Venus titled here in 1999 and was the runner-up in 1998.

The 12-time major champion Serena, the reigning Aussie Open and Wimbledon titlist, had been nursing a knee injury for the last three months.

"I got off to a little bit of a slow start, but it was good and I was able to fight it off," Serena said after advancing.

Meanwhile, second-seeded U.S. Open runner-up Caroline Wozniacki lambasted wild card and Italian favorite Maria Elena Camerin 6-1, 6-0, while Romanian Alexandra Dulgheru toppled third-seeded and defending Rome champion Dinara Safina 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-1 in 2 hours, 40 minutes.

The 2009 French Open runner-up Safina, who returned to the WTA Tour just last week, bested French Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova in last year's all- Russian finale here and was the Rome runner-up in 2006.

Safina has been battling back problems in recent months.

"I think the only good thing about this match was that my back didn't create any problems," Safina said.

Meanwhile, sixth-seeded Russian Elena Dementieva handled Kazakhstan's Yaroslava Shvedova 6-4, 7-5 and former top-ranked star, seventh-seeded Serb Jelena Jankovic, held off American qualifier Bethanie Mattek-Sands 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 to reach the round of 16.

In other action involving top-10 seeds, No. 8 Pole Agnieszka Radwanska routed Italian Roberta Vinci 6-1, 6-0 and former world No. 1 and former French Open champ Ana Ivanovic upended No. 9 Belarusian Victoria Azarenka 6-4, 6-4. Ivanovic will meet Dementieva here on Wednesday.

Eleventh-seeded Belgian Yanina Wickmayer snuck past France's Aravane Rezai 6-3, 6-7 (2-7), 7-5: Czech Lucie Safarova drove out 12th-seeded Italian favorite Flavia Pennetta 6-1, 6-2; Spaniard Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez drubbed 12th-seeded Italian veteran Francesca Schiavone 6-2, 6-2; 14th-seeded Russian Nadia Petrova topped Slovenian Katarina Srebotnik 6-4, 6-4; and 16th- seeded Israeli Shahar Peer came back to dismiss Slovenian Polona Hercog 2-6, 7-5, 6-3 and set-up a date with Venus on Day 4.

Other second-round winners were German Andrea Petkovic and Slovakian Dominika Cibulkova. Petkovic is rewarded with a third-rounder against Serena.

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.