Jessica Ennis knows her best may not be enough in Turkey

 
Lead role: Ennis on her way to clocking the fastest 60m hurdles in the world this year
10 April 2012

There was a time when Jessica Ennis would nervously wait to hear whether she had been selected to represent Britain at a major championships.

Tomorrow will not be one of those days. When the squad for the World Indoors is announced at midday, Ennis will be training with her coach, Toni Minichiello.

Ennis's place in the pentathlon was assured long ago but she and her coach will travel to Istanbul in the knowledge that a fourth major championship gold of her career is well within her grasp.

The Briton is clearly in good form. Two weeks ago,
she twice equalled her personal best for the opening event of the pentathlon, the 60m hurdles, and this weekend she took eight hundredths of a second off it with a time of 7.87 seconds at the Aviva Grand Prix in Birmingham.

More impressive was that the run made her the quickest hurdler indoors this year, eclipsing, perhaps even embarrassing, the more established names in the discipline.

And Ennis followed that with a personal best of 6.47metres in the long jump, leaving her in a good position to gain revenge for her defeat by Tatyana Chernova at last year's World Championships in Daegu.

But she laughed at the suggestion that Istanbul and, more importantly, London will be a straight battle between her and the Russian.

Ennis said: "I've never seen it as me versus her but obviously a lot of people have made it that because of what happened in Daegu.

"But people forget that it's Olympic year and a lot of people come out of the woodwork.

"A lot of people really raise their game and I imagine that it'll be a battle of five or six people going for the gold."

Ennis has a point. While neither she nor Chernova has completed a pentathlon this season in competition, their rivals have and, in some cases, rather impressively.

Ukrainian Nataliya Dobrynska, a disappointing fifth behind the pair in Daegu, registered a points score of 4,880 just four days ago, while at the start of this month Ekaterina Bolshova, of Russia, set the world's best mark of 4,896, just 41 points less than the tally Ennis scored en route to winning the World Indoors title in Doha in 2010.

As a result, Ennis believes she needs to raise her game considerably for the trip to Turkey.

"I'm going to have to score a personal best and really strive for that gold medal," she said.

"I've not really thought about points, although I've seen from the scores from the Russian girls in particular that a big tally will be needed.

"Dobrynska has been scoring really big. It's a really tough challenge for that. I just have to think about each of the individual events and take it one by one."

The other star name set to be included in the British squad for Turkey is Mo Farah, although he admitted that his coach, Alberto Salazar, may yet opt to pull him out of the event and focus on his
pre-Olympic training instead.

"I'll have a chat with my coach," said Farah, who suffered a rare defeat behind Eliud Kipchoge in the two-mile race on Saturday. "I don't know what he'll say. We've still got three weeks to go and that's still quite a long time."

Farah's legs looked surprisingly leaden towards the end of the race yet the Londoner's time of
8 minutes 8.07 seconds still comfortably smashed both the British and European records.

And a bemused Farah said: "I can't explain it. I guess it just goes to show that anything can happen in racing."

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