Serena Williams cranks it up for the end of the season, switching the settings on her make-up gun from "stun" to "kill." Photo via d.yimg.com

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There really isn't any way around it--this has been a pretty crappy fall season for the WTA.  Since an exciting tournament in Toronto which saw Elena Dementieva beat Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova on her way to the final, the WTA season has been a complete dud.

Since Toronto, there have only been two matches between top ten players, both of which took place at the US Open (Wozniacki d. Kuznetsova and S. Williams d. Pennetta). The top players have been playing some, but constant early exoduses from the big tournaments have prevented any marquee match-ups from occurring.  Maria Sharapova pulled off a decent win over a fairly depleted draw in Tokyo and won a thriller against Azarenka early in Beijing, and Svetlana Kuznetsova competently beat players she was supposed to beat for a change to win the China Open, but the rest of the fall season has been downright awful. 

"#1" Dinara Safina managed to find newer depths to fall to, losing to qualifier Kai-Chen Chang in Tokyo despite being some 200 spots ahead of her.  Serena Williams briefly reclaimed the #1 ranking to much applause in Beijing, but swiftly lost her next match against  and hasn't played since, giving Safina back the top spot for the time being.  Kim Clijsters won all of one match in her only post US Open tournament before crashing out of the second round of Luxembourg.  Venus Williams managed to lose in back to back weeks to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, a player who only managed to win three games against Melanie Oudin at the US Open.

But the top eight women all appear to be moderately healthy, and have a chance to make a good last impression in 2009 at the Year End Championships in Doha.  Let's hope they do.  They have months after this event to rest up for next year--might as well put in a good last effort to see off this decade.