Playing for the country is an honour. The ultimate honour, in fact. If you want to look at it as pressure, you will find it very difficult to cope wi… - Sania Mirza

Indian Gold, Indian tea and Indian petrol to the nation: When car manufacturer Hyundai made her brand ambassador for their Getz model, production capacity doubled. She had not yet won a major tournament, but her fame was spreading well beyond Asia: soon she would be on the front of Time magazine and selected by the New Statesman as one of 10 young people with the potential to change the world.

India is the country that produced such cultured male players as Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan, and she might have been expected to place as much emphasis on old-style craft as crunch. In fact, her all-out aggression, underpinned by the sort of destructive forehand that was the signature of her role model Steffi Graf's game, makes her a very contemporary player indeed. To become a top-10 player, she has to work on her mobility and add some dimension to a game that is too dependent on the weighty forehand.

In life there's stuff you can control and stuff you can't. There's nothing you can do about it. No point getting angry and upset because it's beyond your control. As a professional athlete, you learn to roll with the punches.