Victoria Azarenka is one of the Australian Open title favourites and she will be strong favourite against home hope Casey Dellacqua on Wednesday.
It was painful, from a British perspective, to watch Victoria Azarenka's 6-1, 6-0 demolition of Heather Watson in the opening round of the 2012 Australian Open, not least because Watson is widely regarded as the future of women's tennis in the UK. Unfortunately, she was nowhere near good enough and the world number three simply took her game apart.
Azarenka is an expert at negotiating the early rounds of Grand Slams and she frequently wins by wide margins in her first couple of matches at the major tournaments. This is because of her style of aggressive, hard hitting style of play and quick movement, which lesser players simply can't cope with, even on their own serve.
That could well be the case again on Wednesday, when the Belarusian faces Australian youngster Casey Dellacqua. The 26-year-old was given a wild card into the season's first major tournament and did well to beat Bojana Jovanovski in the opening round but she doesn't have the game to live with Azarenka. She is a fine doubles player but her movement isn't good enough to deal with the barrage of shots fired by the third seed and it could well be over very quickly.
Azarenka is 1/40 at
bet365 to win the match, which is a pretty prohibitive price. It is 8/11 that she covers a seven game handicap, which is somewhat intimidating but it shouldn't be too taxing for the winner of last week's Sydney International.
Recommendation
Match Handicap (-7 Games) - Victoria Azarenka (8/11,
bet365)
