Maria Sharapova is trying her best to move on from her doping ban, and it’s been close to two years since she was banned from the game, but it doesn’t help when she shuts down any questions she doesn’t feel like answering.

Following her fourth-round loss to local hero Ashleigh Barty at the Australian Open on Sunday, she had to face the media, and it wasn’t exactly an exercise in smooth PR.

The crowd booed Sharapova after she took a seven-minute toilet break, which many saw as a tactical ploy to try and break the momentum that Barty had gathered.

She also wasn’t too fond of a question related her to decade-long use of meldonium:

Maria Sharapova wasn’t having these questions at all… #AusOpen #9WWOS pic.twitter.com/t8x3YnzbCk

— Wide World of Sports (@wwos) January 20, 2019

Not as dramatic as Bernard Tomic tearing Lleyton Hewitt apart, but a very bad look for an athlete that is struggling to win back the respect of tennis fans and professionals alike.

Over to the Telegraph, with more on why her refusal to answer that second question is telling:

…she declined to answer a perfectly relevant question about the challenge of finding an alternative medication to meldonium, which was outlawed by WADA at the start of 2016.

When Sharapova first revealed the details of her positive test, she said that she had used the drug because of a magnesium deficiency and a family history of diabetes. Coincidentally or not, her effectiveness in deciding sets has fallen since she stopped taking it, from a 76 per cent success rate beforehand to 52 per cent thereafter…

Sharapova seems to like acting as if she were the victim. But there are plenty of other players in the locker-room who have expressed dissatisfaction about her acknowledged use of meldonium for ten years…

It’s the lack of remorse that she continues to show which irks so many, and her display yesterday won’t do her image any good.

You can keep up to speed with today’s Australian Open action here.

[source:telegraph]