No vax drama here: Ash Barty prefers KOs to chaos

The world No.1 and Wimbledon champion skipped through her opening match at Melbourne Park. It’s been a chaotic tournament so far – but she’s the most carefree person in the joint.

‘Nice and clean’ … Ash Barty kicks off her Australian Open campaign with a 6-0 6-1 win over Lesia Tsurenko at Melbourne Park on Monday night. Picture: AFP

Ash Barty keeps it simple. Her matter-of-fact approach to tennis and life will serve her well at an especially bewildering Australian Open.

Her chaos theory is this. Avoid it at all costs.

Barty has mastered the subtle art of keeping her nose clean. Sidestepping drama. Having a hit of tennis and racking up the wins.

While the fallout from the Novak Djokovic visa fiasco and the ever-present threat of Covid-19 hangs over the tournament, she’s just quietly and efficiently going about her business, tiptoeing into Melbourne Park and tiptoeing out again.

Pursuing Australia’s first Open singles championship since Christine O’Neill in 1978, she’s the most carefree person in the joint.

The world No.1 and Wimbledon champion beat Ukraine’s Lesia Tsurenko 6-0
6-1 on Monday night.

It was a lightning bolt of a first-round performance that at a social club, would have warranted a nudie run from Tsurenko – until she pinched a late game.

Barty was all smiles before it, still grinning after it. “This is beautiful,” she said. “ It’s felt like an eternity since I’ve been back on this beautiful court. To play as well as I did tonight, it was a lot of fun out here. I felt like it was nice and clean. I thought I did a good job.”

Perhaps the stars are aligning for Australia to end its 44-year Open drought.

For starters, Barty has been left alone, a place she likes to be, while attention has been focused on Djokovic. She can handle the media gaze but would rather live without it.

Thanks to Djokovic, she’s been able to.

Everything’s sweet in her world. She’s playing with supreme confidence and exquisite skill. She has routines, she sticks to them. Gloriously simple. Another hit of tennis, another win, and there’s six to go to claim the Daphne Ackhust Memorial Cup.

Barty ripped through the first set in 24 minutes. It was such a fast start that it rendered the Rod Laver Arena crowd, capped at 50 per cent capacity, almost silent. Australian tennis crowd are more reactive than proactive and when it became apparent she didn’t need much help, the patrons mostly sat on their hands. Yelling support while wearing masks poses a few problems, and the most common response was polite applause.

Tsurenko is a capable player who’s beaten Barty in the past. She was exasperated and helpless on this occasion, grunting and groaning but taking an eternity to get on the scoreboard. You could have invoked the mercy rule after half an hour.

Parts of the match were played in a silence as deafening as Tennis Australia’s on the Djokovic issue.

It’s a bittersweet evening for ticketholders on a night like this. They’ve paid good money to watch Barty win, but they haven’t seen much of a contest. The flat and almost spookily quiet atmosphere could have rubbed off on Barty but she skipped through the second set without missing a beat. The whole song and dance was over in less than an hour.

Elsewhere on Monday, Australia had a rousing start when wildcard Aleksandar Vukic shocked 30th-seeded South ­African Lloyd Harris in four sets. There was wildly celebratory ­atmosphere on the intimate Court 3 before Vukic said: “It’s totally a dream. You grow up as a kid watching that court, and watching the pros, and I never thought it’d become a reality.”

One of the dangerous Americans in Barty’s half of the draw, 18th-seeded Coco Gauff, was beaten in straight sets by China’s Wang Qiang. More good news for Barty but it wasn’t entirely a walk in the park for the Australians. Thanasi Kokkinakis was coming off a powerhouse win at the Adelaide International but succumbed in three shattering sets to Germany’s Yannick Hanfmann.

Twenty-times major champion Rafael Nadal looked ominous in a straight-sets demolition of American Marcos Giron. He spoke for plenty of us when he said of the Djokovic situation, “By the way, I am quite tired of that, no?”