She has been likened to a young Martina Hingis, but Ashleigh Barty will not make the French Open final as a 16-year-old like the Swiss Miss did.
The Australian wildcard's maiden campaign in Paris ended in a 6-1, 6-2 first-round defeat on Tuesday at the hands of Czech fourth seed Petra Kvitova.
Meanwhile, Jarmila Gajdosova joined Samantha Stosur in the second round after her Slovakian opponent Magdalena Rybarikova retired at 6-3, 4-1 down.
Gajdosova takes on former world number one Caroline Wozniacki in the next round.
For Barty, playing the reigning Wimbledon champion on Court Suzanne Lenglen was always going to be a tall order for the youngest player in either of the singles draws for the clay court grand slam.
And it was all over in 54 minutes as Kvitova capitalised on Barty's obvious butterflies.
The just-turned-16-year-old's nerves were evident in the warm-up when she failed to land 13 straight practise serves.
Not surprisingly, the Queensland youngster then double-faulted on the very first point of the match.
Barty's performance was far from all doom and gloom, though.
The Wimbledon junior champion provided Australian tennis fans with a glimpse of the future as she matched Kvitova's back-court firepower for periods of the match.
Barty also showed grit to hold her opening service game with a big ace down the middle after fighting off two break points.
Alas, eight faults and too many missed dropped shots and netted slice backhands ultimately brought her unstuck.
Kvitova broke Barty three times to take the opening set in 25 minutes.
But Barty was not ready to raise the white flag, breaking Kvitova for the first time to nudge ahead 1-0 in the second set.
The teenager handed the break straight back with another backhand error, but remained with Kvitova until dropping serve for a fifth time in the sixth game to fall behind 4-2.
It was all over for Barty when she flayed a backhand long on Kvitova's first match point.
Later on Tuesday, Russian second seed Maria Sharapova took just 48 minutes to brush aside Romania's Alexandra Cadantu.
Meanwhile 2010 champion Francesca Schiavone of Italy, seeded 14, defeated Japanese veteran Kimiko Date-Krumm 6-3, 6-1.
Kvitova now meets either Urszula Radwanska of Poland or Pauline Parmentier of France while Schiavone, 31 and last year's beaten finalist, advanced to a meeting with either Yanina Wickmayer of Belgium or Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria after ousting Date-Krumm - a decade her elder.
Date-Krumm broke serve in the opening game but thereafter the Japanese was unable to last the pace on a sparsely-populated but sunny Philippe Chatrier show court.
Other seeds to progress were Maria Kirilenko (16), Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (22) and Kaia Kanepi (23).
Guernsey-born Briton Heather Watson, who managed to reach the second round on her debut last year, thereby entering the top 100, got off to a flier against Russian Elena Vesnina.
She romped through her opening set and stayed her ground to win 6-2, 6-4 for a likely match-up against Germany's 25th seed Julia Goerges.
AAP/AFP
Tags: tennis, sport, france First posted May 29, 2012 20:33:51
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