Sharapova set for sound check from outspoken Lisicki

Monday's match between world No?1 Maria Sharapova and 15th seed Sabine Lisicki, could be characterised as the grunter against the moaner.

Lisicki does not moan in the same way that Victoria Azarenka does, with the peculiar two-tier howl that continues for a good second after she has hit the ball. Quite the reverse in fact: the German has broken a conspiracy of silence by speaking out against the sonic aggressors of the women's tour.

And good luck to her for doing so.

Admittedly, Lisicki made her complaint against a lesser light of women's tennis than Sharapova or Azarenka. She was playing her first-round match against Bojana Jovanovski, the world No?117 from Serbia, when she could take it no longer and spoke to the umpire, Mariana Alves.

Some of the issues surrounding grunting are psychological: it can be distracting, for a start, and gives the impression that the noisier player is the alpha female, the one marking her territory with loud shouts of aggression.

But there is also the technical point that the sound of the ball on the racket conveys information about how the shot has been struck. Slices and flat drives make a very different noise. And Lisicki's point was that Jovanovski's grunts were preventing her from picking up those cues.

But will she make the same objection against Sharapova in the opening match on Court No?1 today? She has not ruled it out.

"I'm going to focus on myself in that match," she said. 'We will see what happens out there. It did bother me in my last match and that's why I complained. It was better afterwards."

And what of Sharapova? How would she handle a direct appeal to the umpire from her opponent? "Well, I haven't been in that situation," said the tournament favourite. "And if I am, I'll tell you about it after."

In theory, loud grunters can be penalised under the "hindrance" rule - the same rule that was controversially invoked during last year's US Open final when Serena Williams yelled "Come on" in the middle of a rally, potentially distracting Sam Stosur from her next shot.

In practice, however, this never happens at the top level of the game. Any debate about grunting tends to be restricted to a few pointed comments in the press room, as in Melbourne earlier this year when Agnieska Radwanska described Sharapova's grunts as "pretty annoying and just too loud".

Sharapova then hit back with the catty riposte of "Isn't she back in Poland already?" - a reference to the fact that Radwanska had been beaten by Azarenka in the quarter-finals. Which was all quite amusing, but didn't advance our sum of knowledge enormously.

There was more insight to be had from another comment made by Sharapova during that same conversation in Australia, when she said, "I've been the same over the course of my career. No one important enough has told me to change or do something different."

Over the last few days the Women's Tennis Association has spoken about its renewed determination to remove grunting from the game. It wants to start at the bottom of the pyramid, issuing handheld decibel counters to umpires in junior and lower-level competition, to make sure that the habit never becomes ingrained.

But it has no desire to go to war against established stars such as Sharapova, whose return to No?1 could be worth millions of dollars to its marketing operation. As a result, one suspects that any objections from Lisicki today will fall on deaf ears.

There are some other intriguing fourth-round matches in the women's singles on today's schedule (though the forecast is so bad that only Ana Ivanovic's encounter with Azarenka can be confident of completion). Defending champion Petra Kvitova takes on the former French Open champion Francesca Schiavone, who made a terrible racket herself during her opening-round win over Laura Robson.

And in the match directly following that one on Court Three, the No?8 seed Angelique Kerber meets Kim Clijsters, who swears blind that this will be her last year on the tour. Neither woman has dropped a set yet, but Kerber is a player on the up, which makes one suspect that this could be Clijsters's Wimbledon swansong.