MARIA SHARAPOVA ADVANCES INTO FRENCH OPEN 2015. DAY 2

Her game was awry. Her intensity seemed absent. There were no shouts of "come on!" And most notably, her grunt had a strikingly different aural quality. Cue the eye-rolls. 

A piece on Sharapova’s grunt? Surely not. The Russian’s noise-making is hardly newsworthy; love it or hate it, it has been a trademark of her career since she first emerged on the circuit in 2003. Sharapova’s grunt has often gone through phases and mutations. Earlier in her career she would sometimes play periods of her matches in silence, while it has long been apparent that it goes up in volume and intensity when she is pushed to the limit or mired in a tight third set. 
 But for the most part, it has remained pretty constant in its frequency and guttural quality. Which is why it raises eyebrows whenever it is noticeably altered. The last time that happened was during the European clay court season of 2013. 
In Madrid and Rome, she was silent as she hit the ball, and released the grunt after. It later emerged that she was struggling with a shoulder injury: “I don’t know how I managed to get through Madrid. And then Rome ... I said ‘there’s no way. 
My shoulder just kills. I’m serving, and I’m in a lot of pain’," she revealed in the New York Times. Today's version, in her first-round match against Estonian Kaia Kanepi, was a little yelp, akin to the noise emitted by Czech lefties Petra Kvitova and Lucie Safarova. What was going on? The Twitter-verse lit up with discussion about the very subject. "Sharapova's grunt sounds very weird today. Maybe it's the flu?" one tweeter speculated. "You know something's wrong when Sharapova's grunt is on a different octave," observed another. A prominent tennis tweeter even likened Sharapova's noise to the yelping of a Bichon Frise. Was health the problem again this time around? The signs said so after Sharapova declined to conduct the standard post-match interview on court after beating Kanepi 6-2, 6-4; she departed Philippe-Chatrier Court to a round of boos and jeers. 
"I got sick a week before the tournament (last year), not right before. So I guess that was a little bit better timing. But it's just the way it is. I'm getting over it, and hopefully it will pass by soon," she said.