Adelaide International: The sweat behind the Ash Barty fairytale

Ash Barty is training out the back. Out past the jumping castles, the face painters, the guitarists, the Adelaide Oval cricket net.

Cranky and lathered in sweat, Ash Barty battles through a training session. Picture: Getty Images

Ash Barty is training out the back. Out past the jumping castles, the face painters, the guitarists, the Adelaide Oval cricket nets. One side of her racquet is painted red. The other is green. I’ve expected to see rainbows and lollipops out here but instead she’s a bit cranky. Lathered in sweat. Glaring at her strings as if she doesn’t know who they are anymore.

Practice Court One at Memorial Drive, from noon to 1pm, provides a brutal reminder of the daily grind that goes into being the best in the world at whatever you do. The invisible hours. The painful hours. The dark hours when you just cannot get it right but you keep trying anyway.

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A backhand goes one-third of the way up the net. The next attempt flies so long it nearly hits the back fence on the full. She’s exasperated. She’s wearing bright red shoes and a much-needed red sweatband in 34C heat. Her brow is furrowed. She’s mumbling.

It doesn’t feel right to her, you can tell. Error is piled upon error. She snatches to catch a ball from her coach, Craig Tyzzer, when she could have gloved it as softly as Tim Paine. She looks peeved enough to hit another ball onto the roof of the Adelaide Convention Centre.

It’s a glorious, real-life demonstration of the fight behind the fairytale she is living.

Never doubt the fierce determination in Barty’s veins. Her game face is formidable.

Professional tennis ain’t no sorority party. You don’t top the world rankings by playing nice. Hard, yes. Fair, yes. Little Miss Sunshine, no.

Her ruthlessness is underestimated. She’s won award after award recently, she’s the world No 1, she has a French Open trophy, if there was an award for winning the most awards, she’d have won that, too. Tyzzer, funnily enough, has just received his own award for WTA coach of the year.

Barty’s been on red carpets and podiums. She’s worn fancy dresses and high heels and clinked champagne glasses. But this is her office. Her workbench. Her rehearsal studio. She’s just sprayed five consecutive unforced errors, and, oh no, there’s a sixth. She has to stop. It’s 1pm. Someone else has booked the court. She misses a backhand return. She asks for another quick one. She misses that one, too, waving a dismissive hand as if to say: “Oh, forget it. One of those days.”

In light of her season-opening loss in Brisbane last week and the back-room troubles witnessed on Monday, how fascinating it will be to witness Barty’s opening clash at the Adelaide International on Tuesday against Russia’s world No 31, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

“I feel like I’ve trained and done all the preparation well to put myself in a position to try and play my best tennis,” she says. “That is all I can ask of myself. It’s important to hang in there. You just never know in sport. There’s no certainties. That’s the best part about it. That is what makes it the most fun for me — anything can happen.

“You just need to be willing to prepare and put yourself out there. Try the best that you can and keep fighting. That is something that I like to pride myself on. I love to know that I can kind of go back to my fighting qualities and rely on those if the ball striking isn’t there.”

She’s told of Roger Federer’s belief that topping the rankings can be a freeing experience instead of a suffocating one. That there’s beauty in being the hunted: do your best, wannabes. Hours after her nose-to-the-grindstone training session, she’s in high spirits.

She says: “He seems to have done a pretty good job of it. I don’t think he changes whether it’s one, two, three or 10 next to his name. It doesn’t really matter. I think for me and my team, we’re trying to take that same approach.

“Having a number next to your name doesn’t guarantee anything. It doesn’t guarantee wins. You still have to go out there and do the work and put all of those runs on the board, I suppose, and work from there. All you can do is try your best, every single match. That’s how I’m going to approach this week here in Adelaide.

“That’s how I’m going to approach the Australian Open. That’s how I’m going to approach the rest of my career. Whether the number next to my name is one, two, 10, 20, 50, it’s not going to make me any more or less hungry to try and be the best that I can be. That is what we’re striving for, every single day.

“I want to be the complete tennis player. The challenge is to try and improve as a tennis player. It’s going to be small improvements but improvements nonetheless.”