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The Australian Open Daily Deuce: day three

As fluoro-clad stars grappled with high heat and humidity, nearly 50,000 gathered to watch an Australian-dominated third day.

• Daily Deuce: day one
Daily Deuce: day two

Here’s what caught our eye on day three:

Tall order

Thanasi Kokkinakis and Nick Kyrgios may have big ambitions, but by far the loftiest player in the tournament is Croatian player Ivo Karlovic.

Karlovic stands a whopping 211cm tall, weighs 104.5 kilograms and has size 16 feet.

Compare him to Dominika Cibulkova, one of the shortest players in the Open at 161cm, and the difference is laughable.

Ivo Karlovic height

Tweet star

Who is the most tweeted-about tennis player? According to the Australian Open’s official site, it’s Spaniard Rafael Nadal.

What’s more, Nadal’s “positivity rating” is 80 per cent, meaning the general sentiment of the social media community towards the 28-year-old is a benevolent one.

The least popular of the top-tweeted players are Roberta Vinci, who scores 55 per cent positive sentiment, and Stanislas Wawrinka, who scores 60 per cent on positive sentiment.

Baby Petrova

During Maria Sharapova’s near-miss match against Alexandra Panova, one attentive viewer noticed Panova bore a slight resemblance to a couple of familiar faces.

While we think the Natalie Portman comparison might be a bit of a stretch, we can certainly see the resemblance between Panova (below right) and Petrova (left) – and it’s not just to do with their last names.

Is this Nadia, the second coming?

nadia-petrova

Words of wisdom

When the going gets tough, the tough write thoughtful sentiments on their arms in indelible ink.

Both Stanislas Wawrinka and Svetlana Kuznetsova clearly struggle to motivate themselves during on-court battles and thus have had to resort to tattoos to keep on fighting.

Kuznetsova’s reads “Pain doesn’t kill me, I kill the pain”, while Wawrinka’s poses the question “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Moving stuff.

tennis-player-tattoos

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