Your Tennis News Round-Up: Who’s In …

Shahar Peer, mainly.

She’s now beaten Yanina Wickmayer, top seed Caroline Wozniacki, and now Li Na after the latter was forced to retire with a back injury trailing 75 30. She may be surrounded by a small fleet of bodyguards and yet to play on the main court, there may be bizarre Twitter assassination nonsense going on, but Shahar is doing her job and doing it incredibly well under difficult circumstances. Good girl.

Victoria Azarenka had an impressive 61 63 over Vera Zvonareva, a titlist last week in Pattaya City and the conqueror of Jelena Jankovic one round earlier. Before today, Azarenka was 1 for 4 against Zvonareva. Nice to see her making inroads in the head-to-head.

Agnieszka Radwanska is also having a quietly impressive tournament, bagelling Flavia Pennetta and then earning a three-set win over Regina Kulikova, who took out Svetlana Kuznetsova. And props to Venus Williams for overcoming temporary nemesis Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova to progress to the semi-finals.

 In Memphis, Maria Sharapova is into the quarterfinals, which means she’s won her first matches of 2010. She’ll be hoping to join Anne Keothavong, playing her first proper tournament since her extended lay-off with that knee injury, who beat Karolina Sprem in straights to progress to the semifinals. But another Brit, Elena Baltacha, stands in her way …

On the men’s side, Andy Roddick is the only top seed left after he defeated James Blake. He’ll be facing Lu later for a place in the semifinals.

Jo and Gael will be facing off in Marseilles after they both had tough wins today over Ouanna and Seppi respectively.

And I have no idea what’s going on in Bogota or Buenos Aires. But the latter seems to have involved wins for Boss and Ferru, so I’m in favour, in general.