{"id":83780,"date":"2017-01-15T06:58:59","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T06:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swn.af\/lib\/years-first-grand-slam-kicks-off-on-monday\/"},"modified":"2017-01-15T06:58:59","modified_gmt":"2017-01-15T06:58:59","slug":"years-first-grand-slam-kicks-off-on-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/years-first-grand-slam-kicks-off-on-monday\/","title":{"rendered":"Year\u2019s first Grand Slam kicks-off on Monday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/Uploads\/2017\/jan\/15\/Tennis.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>MELBOURNE (SW): All is set for the year&rsquo;s first Grand Slam as top tennis players from around the world land arrive in Melbourne for the Australian Open.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>World number one Andy Murray begins his Australian Open campaign on Monday with a match against world number 95 Illya Marchenko of Ukraine. Defending women&#39;s champion Angelique Kerber and four-time men&#39;s winner Roger Federer are also in action on day one of the tournament in Melbourne. Murray, who won last year&#39;s Wimbledon and Olympic Games on his way to becoming world number one, has lost in five Australian Open finals, including in 2016 when he was beaten by Novak Djokovic.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I obviously feel pretty confident after the way the last season finished,&quot; the BBC has quoted Murray as saying. I&#39;m in a decent position to do it. I have a chance to win.&rdquo; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Serb Djokovic begins his 2017 campaign on Tuesday versus Fernando Verdasco of Spain, while America&#39;s Serena Williams, aiming to win a record-breaking seventh women&#39;s singles title faces Switzerland&#39;s Belinda Bencic.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, injury-hit Rafael Nadal, has said he had not played without pain for years, but that he remained optimistic of challenging for big titles again.<\/p>\n<p>ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MELBOURNE (SW): All is set for the year\u2019s first Grand Slam as top tennis players from around the world land arrive in Melbourne for the Australian Open.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[93],"class_list":["post-83780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport","tag-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}