Clijsters Has the Potential to Go All the Way

A continuous stream of praise can go to a teenager's head, so it is just as well that Belgium's Kim Clijsters, the 19-year-old girlfriend of Lleyton Hewitt, is one of the most balanced and bright young women on the circuit. She is also playing wonderfully well, having won four of her past five tournaments and notched up 23 victories in her past 25 matches. But sensibly she refuses to be drawn into comparisons with the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus.

Yesterday Hewitt, who had just won his second-round match with consummate ease, told the crowd in the Rod Laver Arena that he believed Clijsters had every chance of winning the title, especially "having beaten both the Williams in Los Angeles" in the end-of-season WTA Championships last year. He may be right, and what a weekend it would be if he added the men's crown.

Earlier Clijsters, the No4 seed, had underlined her prowess with a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Hungary's Petra Mandula in a second-round match which took only 33 minutes, a time only Steffi Graf had ever bettered - by one minute - in a grand slam.

Having cracked the veneer of invincibility that has built up around Serena in particular over the past 12 months, Clijsters may go one better than her appearance in the 2001 French Open final, when she lost to Jennifer Capriati 12-10 in the third set. After that she fell into what was by her standards a fallow period, during which she struggled with an arm injury and split from her long-time coach Carl Maes.

She is now working with Marc Dehous and has a full-time fitness trainer to help make the most of her enviable speed. Having inherited the powerful legs of her footballer father Leo and the suppleness of her gymnast mother Els, she could scarcely be better equipped genetically.

"You know I'm very happy to have my type of legs, especially to play sport," she said. "Maybe not for modelling but to play tennis you have to run a lot of balls down and for that I think my legs are very good." Speed is an attribute she shares with Hewitt. "When Lleyton won the US Open title and then Wimbledon, I felt like I won them as well," she said. "That's what really made me realise how much it means for a tennis player to win those big events."

Serena Williams, whom Clijsters may meet in the semi-finals, was back to her best with a 6-4, 6-0 win over another Belgian, Els Callens, but Monica Seles, the No6 seed and four times champion here, was beaten 6-7, 7-5, 6-3 by Klara Koukalova of the Czech Republic, aged 20 and ranked 113 in the world.

Seles, in seven visits to the Australian Open dating back to 1991, had never failed to get beyond the last 16 but on this occasion she rolled over her left ankle early in the first set and needed lengthy treatment. "I was in bad pain but I just tried to hang in and tough it out," she said. "But it was not to be."