Monday Watercooler

The tennis season is long, but rarely boring, even during the endless autumn. Take this past week's tournaments in Moscow, Stockholm and Luxembourg. These are hardly revered locales (the Kremlin Cup is one the sports' best trophy names, however), but they produced some fascinating champions Sunday. Let's go from the smallest nation's winner to the largest:

Luxembourg: Timea Bacsinszky -- The 20-year-old Swiss' victory might be the biggest surprise of the week. Unseeded, Bacsinszky won five matches, including those over the suddenly-potent Yanina Wickmayer and hard-hitting Sabine Lisicki, to claim her first career WTA title. Doubly impressive: Bacsinszky won her quarterfinal (against Katarina Srebotnik) and semifinal (against Wickmayer) after dropping the first set.

I've never seen Bacsinszky play, but I've seen her out on the town. She was in attendance for a player party at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills during last year's August tournament, and turned heads with a loud, snazzy outfit. Really, it's one of the few reasons that I knew who she was after that. Good to see her make some noise on the court.

Stockholm: Marcos Baghdatis -- Steve Tignor devoted some e-ink to the Cypriot earlier this week; maybe he knew something we didn't? The 2006 Australian Open finalist has been off the main tennis radar for months, mixing ATP-level matches with ventures into the Challenger circuit, where he's won three tournaments this year (Vancouver, St. Remy and, last week, Tashkent).

Baghdatis earned the last direct acceptance into Stockholm, and the fan favorite made good on his good fortune with an impressive title run, winning all eight sets played. It's true that Baghdatis avoided the biggest land mine, Robin Soderling, when the Swede withdrew from his semifinal due to injury. But for someone who started the month ranked outside the Top 100 -- Baghdatis is now 41 -- you take what you can get.

Moscow: Francesca Schiavone -- The Kremlin Cup was supposed to be the stage for Jelena Jankovic and Vera Zvonareva -- only five rankings points apart in the WTA standings, in positions 8 and 9, respectively -- to determine who would get the final spot in the year-end championships. Being the tournament's top two seeds, there was also the possibility of them meeting in the final, just to heighten the drama. But after Zvonareva lost a second-rounder to Tsvetana Pironkova, the luster was gone; Jankovic herself was eliminated just a round later.

Schiavone emerged from the rubble and cruised to her second career WTA title. Aside from a three-set first-round win over doubles specialist Nuria Llagostera Vives, Schiavone rolled through the draw largely unharmed; her closest match thereafter was a 6-2, 7-5 decision over Monica Niculescu in round two. Did you know: Schiavone was 1-10 in WTA tour finals, heading into the Moscow final. Olga Govortsova, herself the beneficiary of a cushy draw, was just the tonic Schiavone needed (the Italian won 6-3, 6-0).

Chat here about this past weekend's winners -- Mikhail Youzhny, we haven't forgotten about you either (it's Halloween, how could we)? -- and other tennis talk throughout the day.

-- Ed McGrogan, TW Contributing Editor