Sydney: It takes a lot to knock the smile off Caroline Wozniacki's face and a few early setbacks in the phony war before the Australian Open were hardly going diminish her natural ebullience.
The Dane was confirmed as the top seed for Melbourne Park on Thursday and with defending champion Serena Williams absent injured, expectations are high that she can claim her maiden major title to go with the world number one ranking.
Losses to Vera Zvonareva - a 6-1, 6-0 drubbing - and Kim Clijsters in New Year exhibitions, followed by defeat in her first match at the Sydney International, might have suggested that all was not well with the 20-year-old.
Wozniacki, however, pitched up after her defeat to Dominika Cibulkova at the Sydney Olympic Centre this week, her dangly earrings and beaming smile in place, to explain that such defeats were par for the course at the start of the year.
"It's always pretty much like this at the beginning of the season," she said. "You just want to see where you're standing, what's going on.
"I'll be good for Melbourne. I'm feeling confident, I'm feeling good. It'll be a good tournament."
Martina Navratilova echoed many women's tennis fans when she said this week that she would like a Wozniacki win in Melbourne to end a "weird" few years in the game where number ones like Dinara Safina have failed to take the major prizes.
Wozniacki's marketability means the WTA would not be that upset either if their youngest number one since Maria Sharapova were to develop into a dominant player on the tour.
An accomplished media performer, Wozniacki was never likely to leave a hostage to fortune by predicting a Melbourne triumph but there was clearly no trepidation about heading south to the Victorian capital.
"I really like playing there," she said. "It's a great start of the season. I like the city as well, and the atmosphere.
"I'm feeling good, so I'm looking forward (to it). I don't know how far I can go. Every time I go into a tournament, I want to win it.
"Of course, that's what I'll be trying to do when I play there. But we need to take one match at a time. There're a lot of good players out there."
Wozniacki was top seed at the US Open last year but bowed out in the semifinals to Russian Zvonareva, ending a run of 13 wins for the Dane as she finished the year strongly with titles in four of her last six tournaments.
Her fellow baseline counter-puncher Zvonareva went on to lose to Clijsters in the final, a bitter experience Wozniacki had tasted the year before in her only grand slam final to date.
Belgian third seed Clijsters is in top form and again looks like being a big threat in Melbourne but Wozniacki, who reached the fourth round last year, would have to go deep into the second week for that to be a factor.
She knows she has a lot of work to do before that.
"I just want to get everything together, all the puzzles together that I've been working on and to make everything function and not just one thing and then the other thing isn't working," she said. "I want everything to just click."
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