As tournaments go, they just don't get any hotter The 2014 Australian Open will be remembered as much for the number of familiar names and faces who weren't there at the pointy end, as the lesser lights who found the form and belief to carry them deeper into a grand slam than they'd been before. Yet the tournament's greatest imprint was almost literally burned into the consciousness of all who experienced four consecutive days of temperatures generally deemed unsafe for dogs, let alone athletes exerting themselves for three or more hours at a time. As much as the host broadcaster tried to cook up a storm over Sloane Stephens supposedly celebrating Serena Williams' demise, Mother Nature provided the biggest controversy. Jerzy Janowicz of Poland attempts to deal with the heat. Andy Murray's dire prediction that the heat was almost enough to give a bloke a heart attack was but one of many dizzying pronouncements made in week one, as the temperature hit the low-to-mid 40s and refused to yield and sent players, spectators and commentators more than a little mad. The insistence of referee Wayne McKewen, tournament doctor Tim Wood and their boss Craig Tiley that it was safe to continue playing with the mercury stuck on 43 convinced many that they were the barmiest of the lot. Martina Navratilova called Wood "completely clueless," Ivan Dodig feared he might die on court, and Canadian Frank Dancevic collapsed, came to, played on to defeat, then announced that he'd seen Snoopy. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga thought his shoes were sticking to the court, Caroline Wozniacki reckoned her water bottle had started to melt. John Isner likened the conditions to the moment when you're cooking a roast and open the oven door to find the potatoes are done. Camila Giorgi of Italy (top left), Maria Sharapova of Russia (top right), Kei Nishikori of Japan (bottom left), and Alize Cornet of France (bottom righ) use ice-packed towels during breaks to cope with the heat. However you carved it, there was no denying Murray's assessment that playing through four days of ridiculous heat was not a good look for a tournament that sells itself as the players' favourite grand slam. At last, on the first Thursday and three days into the heatwave, organisers invoked the "extreme heat policy," ceasing play on the outside courts and closing the roof on the two main stadiums. By then there had been vision aplenty beamed around the world of woozy ball kids being helped into the shade and Chinese woman Shuai Peng vomiting at a change of ends. Hot weather is as much a staple of the Australian Open as idiotic chanting, but for players the vagueness of the guidelines is almost as draining as being forced to play through it. Maria Sharapova led the charge after toiling for 3½ hours, saying "nobody really knows what the limit is in terms of temperature or humidity." Sam Stosur made the third round, which is a shade better than par over 12 ho-hum attempts to win her home grand slam. Casey Dellacqua revelled in the heat, declaring herself to be "solar powered" as she repeated her heroic run to the fourth round of 2008, complete with cheering Nanna in the stands. Bernard Tomic retired hurt, Lleyton Hewitt fell two sets down against a higher-ranked opponent before fighting back to take it to five. That he couldn't pull off the umpteenth back-to-the-wall victory of his career is compelling evidence that time is finally catching one of the great running men of his generation. Marinko Matosevic couldn't get past the first round of a grand slam for the 12th time from 12 attempts, but went down screaming in one of the more bizarre exits of the fortnight. The rankings put Matosevic as Australia's No. 3 man behind Hewitt and Tomic, but the homegrown story of the tournament left pundits convinced it won't be long before he is overtaken by a pair of rising stars with exotic names and compelling games, whose first-round wins saw them lumped together with a nickname inspired by a breakfast cereal. The Special Ks - Nick Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis - won first-round matches that brought them a wave of public support that was washing away from the beleaguered Tomic. Eighteen and 17 respectively, they have the rangy appeal and talent to go far; John Newcombe sees both as top-20 material, perhaps top 10. Kokkinakis bowed out predictably to Rafael Nadal, while Kyrgios won the first two sets against the seeded Benoit Paire before faltering. But their marketability and on-court potential was clear and, as Jake Niall wrote in these pages, they have something else on their side: the good mates are effectively arriving together, so will share a burden of expectation that has been shouldered solo by Tomic and Hewitt before him. They weren't the sort of results that made jaws drop, but the fortnight produced a steady stream of outcomes that rubbed against the grain. The women's side of the draw unfolded as a long, steady stream of fancied players being picked off like ducks at a shooting gallery, producing semi-finals devoid of any of the top three seeds for the first time at Melbourne Park since 1997. The men were more conventional, although Stanislas Wawrinka's five-set revenge over Novak Djokovic in the quarters meant the 2014 championships marked the first time in the Open era that neither the men's nor women's defending champion reached the last four, and the first at any slam since Steffi Graf and Yevgeny Kafelnikov lost in the last eight at the 1997 French Open. Garbine Muguruza tipped over former world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki in the third round, Ivanovic sent Serena Williams home in the fourth with her first win over the powerhouse of the women's game at their fifth meeting, At the same stage of the tournament, eventual finalist Dominika Cibulkova felled third seed Sharapova in a women's tennis version of David and Goliath, where the Slovak spotted her Russian opponent 27 centimetres. A pattern was set whereby heady triumph was followed by sobering defeat. Rising Romanian Simona Halep blitzed Jelena Jankovic, the eighth seed, then was blown away by Cibulkova. Eugenie Bouchard toppled Ivanovic, only to be smashed by Li Na. Agnieszka Radwanska played the most irresistible tennis of the fortnight to end Victoria Azarenka's pursuit of a hat-trick of Australian Open titles, only to be thrashed by Cibulkova in the other semi-final. The woman with the briefest name in the game and the shortest player in the women's top 50 duly faced off for the trophy, and while the result was a somewhat predictable straight-sets win to Li Na (giving her a second slam and first Australian Open at the third trip to the final), both emerged from the tournament smiling. Cibulkova's pluck and power marked her at 24 as a player demanding to be measured by much more than a height chart. Li went within a few centimetres of joining the shock early casualties when she saved a third-round match point against Lucie Safarova, but by the final she was in rude command of her game. Her post-match offerings were charming, including her stock piece of thanking/needling her chuckling husband, and highlighted after an earlier win by the observation that she could never throw her racquets on court because they are her friends. She even has names for them - Li Na one through to Li Na eight. On the men's side, Wawrinka's passage to Sunday night's showdown with Nadal, underpinned by a backhand crafted by the tennis gods, continued his late blossoming from years of wearing the "Swiss No. 2" tag to a genuine threat to all who meet him. Conversely, bowing to a groin strain after dropping the opening set of the tournament to Nadal didn't exactly swell Tomic's fan base, particularly among those who took their opening-round seats hoping to see Australia's No. 2 serve it up to the world No. Scans showed Tomic's complaint to be genuine, but at 21 he is a long way from securing any great measure of public sympathy. Nor were tournament officials as patience waned in week one, and the athletes who worked exceptionally hard for their money labelled the decision to keep playing inhumane. The sense that their fate was being decided by men sending "move along, nothing to see here" messages from air-conditioned offices didn't exactly cool the situation. Crowd numbers were down by as much as 15,000 on corresponding days from 2013. The stars can complain all they like, but when a major sporting event starts taking a hit to the hip pocket, change is surely not far away. Roger Federer will never be labelled a loser, but despite a quarter-final victory over an under-prepared Andy Murray, the Swiss' dismissal by Nadal in their semi-final had a tinge of sadness to it.