TENNIS/Trilogy Event: Johnny Watterson gets to chat - on the phone to the former Russian prodigy Anna Kournikova about her determination to return to the top.

So herewe are on the phone with Anna. Sashayed into Dublin Airport yesterday morning for the fashion and tennis Trilogy. For Kournikova, could anything fit as snugly as a tennis-fashion extravaganza?

Wafted into the Four Seasons Hotel and now she's doing what she has done a million times. You've read the interviews, the 3,768 words from Paul Kimmage in the Sunday Times - Anna in defensive mode; the Wimbledon stories - Anna in a defensive mood; the tabloid angles - Anna in defensive mode. Kimmage had brought the thumbscrews and electric prods to Florida. That's what you need just to break the carapace.

Now we have Anna laughing into the phone. Just back from Spain, where Conchita Martinez beat her in another exhibition. Doesn't matter. This is tennis holiday time. Exhibitions, shooting the breeze around the world, taking the same questions on the chin and building towards that first tournament win.

This is to be the year. This is to be the resurrection of the one-time best junior player in the world, the top-10 player who slid right out of the elite end of the reckoning and into the celebrity limelight.

"Overall, this season has been quite good for me. I started the year coming back ranked 100, coming back from an eight-month injury," she says. "I played pretty well at the start of year but then after a few months I probably got tired playing so much. Then I had a good second half and got to 30 something in the world rankings."

Thirtysomething is good. Ireland have never had a thirtysomething player. But Kournikova's curse is that people expect more simply because she promised it when she was a Russian teenager burning a vapour trail through the game.

Sports fans value the talent, the market a pretty face. Kournikova has both, but every time she walks down the ramp or turns into the cameras for one of her many off-court appearances, some people see less, not more.

From the outside, her life is a specimen constantly observed, exaggerated and warped under the media microscope, a laboratory existence that at just 21 has become normal. An institutionalised class of celebrity.

"I can't really control the media attention," she says. "I can't really control it. All I can do is do my job, play and work as hard as I can. Just go out and play. That's all. It's not my job to convince them (media) of anything. Now I'm just happy to be healthy again, to be on court playing again.

"I have people around me who have known me for ever. To them I'm just another person and to me they're just another person. I really don't take the whole thing that seriously. I do what I'm supposed to do and then focus on my tennis and concentrate on that."

Don't talk about Enrique, you are asked. Enrique Iglesias as is the current. His dad kept goal for Real Madrid but got sucked into the crooning business and left a life of soccer behind him. That won't happen here. Tennis is where Kournikova sees her future.

"Next year is a big year for me and if I'm not injured I hope to do even better if I stay healthy," she says. "I'm looking forward to starting the year again and be on the road. Yeah, I have set a goal for myself. I really want to get back into the top 10. That's where I was before I got injured last year. So that's good enough. To me that's a realistic target . . . you know, I've been there before.

"I was around 100 and now I'm 30 something. I seem to be doing everything right and going in the right direction. Definitely I'll look at the next major, the Australian Open, and get to the third, fourth rounds or quarter-finals. It all depends who I play and that I remain injury free. It's a month and a half away but I definitely want to get past the fourth round. That would be my idea."

This tournament win thing. This weight bearing down on her shoulders even when competing in the most tangential tournaments to the mainstream WTA events follows her around the world at a dizzy pace. It is a penance. In Kournikova's perfect world, it's the only obvious imperfection that the public can seize. And so they do. This year she faced Israeli player Anna Smashnova in the final of a Shanghai event. Smashnova is a backcourt player who Ireland's Karen Nugent should have beaten in a junior Wimbledon quarter-final in the early 1990s. But the battling hitter took Kournikova's scalp too.

"I'd see it as a great thing," she says. "I got to a final. Won a lot of matches in a row. She was obviously better that day, but I'd beaten her twice before that, two weeks in a row. But she was really ready to beat me. It was a tough match but definitely a step forward."

Her Russian bolshieness comes through. She's defiant. She's 21. She laughs a lot. She has talent and she knows who's in control.

It's not you.