It must feel like Groundhog Day for Samantha Stosur as she wakes up morning after morning trying to digest another nagging defeat on home courts.
Stosur, the serving powerhouse who blew away the great Serena Williams in the 2011 US Open final, openly admits she struggles to cope with the pressure and expectation of trying to replicate her grand slam success in Australia.
“You win one grand slam and then people just say `she’ll do it again, it’ll be in Australia’. But it’s not that easy. It’s not that simple,” Stosur has said.
In fact, winning even one match – let alone seven straight – in front of expectant home fans is proving increasingly difficult.
Tellingly, Stosur’s home woes coincide with her rise to prominence as a grand slam contender when she charged into the 2010 French Open final.
Since then, the enigmatic Queenslander has only once recorded back-to-back victories in Australia – and her record at Melbourne Park makes for particularly grim reading.
The 29-year-old has yet to beat a top-20 rival at her home slam and has ventured beyond the third round just twice in 11 Australian Opens.
And despite reaching the last eight six times – two finals, two semi-finals and two quarter-finals – at other grand slams, Stosur has never really come close to reaching the quarter-finals at the Melbourne major.
“There’s no magic dust that’s going to make anything go away or fix it overnight or anything,” she said during her miserable run last summer.
Not that she’s not trying new formulas.
After a series of early exits in Brisbane and Sydney, Stosur opted for a fresh approach this summer, using the Hopman Cup in Perth and Hobart International as her Australian Open tune-ups.
But the change of scenery hasn’t helped so far, as Stosur’s run of outs continued at the Hopman Cup with losses to rising Canadian Eugenie Bouchard, Italian nemesis Flavia Pennetta, who she’s never beaten, and former Wimbledon runner-up Agnieszka Radwanska.
“Look, I’m certainly not unhappy with the way I’m hitting the ball. That’s not an issue,” Stosur said after stumbling in three sets against the fifth-ranked Radwanska on Thursday night.
No, the issue with Stosur, as ever, is not between the lines but between the ears.
The one-time world No.4 – now ranked 18th – has long used a sports psychologist and even once turned to seven-times surfing world champion Layne Beachley in a bid to control her mental demons.
Little wonder even Stosur’s new coach can’t say if Australia’s only female grand slam champion in the past 34 years will ever contend for another major.
“She’s shown she’s a great player and that she can do it, that she’s got the game to,” Miles Maclagan, former mentor to Andy Murray and Marcos Baghdatis, told AAP after linking up with Stosur last month.
“But whether she does or not, I don’t know. It’s up to her.”
Maclagan knows few players in women’s tennis are able to dominate a match quite like Stosur and says he has no intention of radically changing her game.
“It’s a matter of trying to build on the tennis that I’ve already got,” Stosur said.
“Right from our first conversation, he’s like: `You obviously know how to play tennis. You play very well. You’ve got all these great attributes’.
“So it’s a matter of trying to keep bringing those out and work on the aspects that I’m not quite so confident on and get better and hopefully keep building my all-round game to be as good as it can be.
“There’s no secret at times that my backhand tends to break down and that’s key and that can sometimes feed into other aspects of my game, so we’ve spent a lot of time working on that.”
Despite her winless week in Perth, Stosur will head to Hobart on Friday as top seed and believing she still has time to reverse her fortunes ahead of the Australian Open starting on January 13.
“Even though now I’ve had three losses compared to one loss in Brisbane (last year), I do feel better at this stage,” she said after losing to Radwanska.
“This is exactly what I need, I need these matches under my belt – win or lose – and that was the sole purpose coming here this week.
“Obviously you’d have loved to have won them all, or even one, but I’m getting that match play. I’m having some long matches, which is definitely what I need at this point of time.”