Tuesday Update:
My latest match report/analysis of Dominic Thiem’s victory over Alexander Zverev is now posted on Tennis with an Accent —> Red Brick Architecture: Thiem Builds a Sound Plan
Note: You can also follow Tennis with an Accent for great coverage of Roland Garros. I am delighted to be contributing to their efforts this week.
I am sure that by the time the top seed Simona Halep entered the court to face the 16th-seeded Elise Mertens, on a cloudy day at Roland Garros, she had a game plan set in her mind, one that her and her coaching team agreed upon. Whether she could execute that plan to perfection or not mattered less, at the end of the day, than her putting a check mark in the win column.
Because for Halep fans, you see, playing an exquisite brand of tennis in the fourth round of a Major, while rewarding, is not a primary concern in the grander context of their player’s pursuit of the holy grail. And they may have a point. She has already reached the second week of a Major a number of times doing just that – playing high-quality tennis – and it did not necessarily translate into what seems to have become her career-defining goal over the last few years.
Halep wants to – needs to – win a Major.
I reckon that she would have taken the win against Mertens, no matter how she gets it, and not mind experiencing a one-match delay in producing her best tennis. It is rather in the next three matches that she will need to “put the package together,” so to speak, in order to achieve that which she craves and, in my opinion, deserves. More on that at the end.
She faced an opponent who has been in fine form over the last several months. Mertens, a high-IQ, player with a variety of strokes at her disposal, has amassed three WTA titles this year (Hobart, Lugano, Rabat) and reached the semifinal round of the Australian Open. She is also currently ranked no.16, a career high for the Belgian.
Although Halep defeated Mertens handily in Madrid (6-3 6-0) and halted her 13-match winning streak – including her two Fedcup wins –, it seemed overboard to expect a similar type of rout here.
Indeed, it started as if it would be tight match. The first four games featured long rallies, with both women moving each other around and looking for openings. Mertens held the first game, producing two winners, both stemming from well-hit first serves, allowing her to execute the 1-2 punch to perfection twice. Halep responded with an almost replica of that on her serve the next game, with a couple of 1-2 punch winning combinations of her own.
By the third game, both players were deeply focused on their tasks and rallies were tenacious. It turned out to be the key game of the match, one in which each player had chances to win the game, but the other kept on digging deep and coming back. There was one slight problem for Mertens. It was her service game and she double-faulted three times in it. The last one came on her fourth opportunity to hold. Halep won the next two points and closed the 18-point-long game.
Little did we know that Simona would never relinquish the lead for the rest of the match.
The world number one played a very aggressive brand of tennis, more than she has shown in the past. Apparently, that was deliberate. She said on her on-court interview after the 6-2 6-1 win that her goal was to be her “more aggressive,” but not necessarily in terms of winners, but of speed production in her shots.
She started hitting the ball hard from the beginning of the match and it did indeed work in her favor. It kept Mertens pinned behind the baseline, preoccupied with just getting ball back in the court. Naturally, that also meant that Simona herself, in return, made more errors. But that was understood and accepted. The intention was to keep Mertens so busy chasing balls that she could never got the luxury of calibrating her full arsenal of weapons.
The few times Elise did get the chance, Halep had the answers. She tried to sneak in some drop shots, Simona was quick with her first step. She tried to slice low, Simona stepped forward quickly, got under the ball, and accelerated on those, taking time away from her. She attempted to increase the pace of the rally, Simona counter-punched with interest.
Halep finished with more winners than Mertens but for a while in the first set, until she built a firm lead, she also committed more unforced errors than Mertens. The final score will not tell the tale of how contested the first twenty minutes of this match was. Halep, for her part, was very much aware of it:
“It was not that easy, like the score shows. All the games were tough. She’s a tough opponent. I had to pay attention of every ball we played.”
“Those four games at the beginning were really important, and after that I relax myself and I could play a little bit better.”
Play better, she did.
She put on a recital after those first twenty minutes, especially with her down-the-line accelerations on both sides. Leading 4-2, Halep broke her opponent’s serve for the second time when she hit an emphatic backhand cross-court winner at deuce and followed that up with a backhand down-the-line passing shot. Then, she shifted to a higher gear and cruised the rest of the way, making only four unforced errors until the end.
Mertens’s observations were no different: “She was too strong, too good for me. The first four games were more or less my level, but it was just these four games. Afterwards, I made a lot of mistakes. I wanted to be too aggressive. But she was everywhere. She served pretty well. That’s it.”
So, at the end of the day, Halep got her cake and ate it too. She got the win and performed at an extremely elevated level. The question still remains, can she “put the package together” for three more matches? Starting with the quarterfinal round, the dynamics will shift, and it will have a lot to do with the individual standing on the other side of the net.
On Wednesday, it will be Angelique Kerber. And against Angie, Simona cannot just take the win “no matter how she gets it” – yes, I quoted myself from above, I know, it’s despicable – because she will not get the win unless she produces high quality tennis. It will not stop there either. If she succeeds, she will need to do it again to conquer her semifinal opponent, and again, to get to the holy grail.
There are players who barely survive the early rounds, not playing particularly well, only to peak in the last couple of matches and win titles. There are also those who begin the tournament well and ride that confidence all the way to the title. And then, there are those who peak during a tournament, only to see their form take a nosedive in the semifinal or final rounds.
Halep fans can only hope that their player belongs to that middle group, because her performance today on the Philippe Chatrier court was nothing short of sublime.
Saturday Update:
My latest match report/analysis of Anett Kontaveit’s 7-6 7-6 upset win over Petra Kvitova is now posted on Tennis with an Accent —> Kontaveit Conquers Kvitova in a Hodgepodge Galore
Note: You can also follow Tennis with an Accent for great coverage of Roland Garros. I am delighted to be contributing to their efforts this week.
My match recap/analysis of Mihaela Buzarnescu’s straight-set upset win over 4th-seeded Elina Svitolina on Friday will appear on Tennis with an Accent website. Once it is posted, I will add the link here.
UPDATE: My piece is now posted at Tennis with an Accent —> Click here to read: “Delayed by a Dozen Years”
Note: You can also follow Tennis with an Accent for great coverage of Roland Garros. I am delighted to be contributing to their efforts this week.
I have written plenty about Grigor Dimitrov before in my articles and talked about him during my guest appearances in the media and on Tennis with an Accent podcasts. I always felt – and still do – that although he has the potential to join the elites of our sport, he needed to settle on a direction for an A game plan and succeed on a specific surface before moving on to conquer all surfaces. During the 2014-16 period, he was stuck playing an ‘in-between’ game style where he would try to play consistent and outlast his opponents on slow courts, while adopting an attacking style on fast courts. Grigor’s talent level certainly permits him to play at a high level on all surfaces, using different tactics. But was it enough for him to catapult his status into the next level?
Starting with 2017, I felt that he began to indeed have a clearer vision of his target (his coaching-team changes may have had something to do with that). He seemed to have decided to take an aggressive approach in his style, which was the right move in my opinion. Because, when you make such a decision, you can begin to meticulously work on every detail of the specific pursuit without having to spread your attention on different strategies. Thus, his success in the latter portions of the 2017 campaign, culminating in his triumph at the Nitto ATP Finals in London and in a career-high number three ranking.
In 2018, another problem popped up. Having entered the year with extremely high expectations, Dimitrov had disappointing outings in the down-under swing (losing in the quarterfinals to Kyle Edmund in Melbourne and never really playing at a high level in the previous rounds), followed by more dismay in Indian Wells and Miami. I can’t evidently be 100% sure about what goes on in a player’s head but observing Grigor’s match play during February, March, and April, I am fairly certain that doubt has crept – and settled – into his mind, leading to some confidence-related damage.
The good news for Dimitrov fans is that he still believes in his game and feels that he can get back to his end-of-2017 level of play. Another good piece of news, at least from my perspective, is that he is not willing to go back to the game-searching phase of 2014-16. His match against the American Jared Donaldson is a good example of why I believe that, and his words in the post-match press conference confirm that: “I was very clear on how I wanted to play my match.” Before I unpack that statement and the rest of what he said, let me remind readers the sequence of the match to which he was referring at that moment in the press conference.
He was answering a question that touched on the last game of the third set when he was serving at 4-5, and it all fell apart for him in a matter of three points, allowing Donaldson to get the break and go up two sets to one.
Until that moment, both players were handily winning their serves. At 15-15, Grigor had a routine forehand inside the court that he had put away many times up to that point. It was a low but a short ball which allowed him to move inside the court and guide the forehand topspin to the open backhand side of Donaldson. Grigor gagged it wide and tilted his head tilted to one side in deep disappointment.
You could almost tell that doubt crept into his mind in those few seconds. In the next point, his feet seemed to get heavy (typical response by an apprehensive mind). He hit three shots off his backfoot in that rally and framed one, before finally missing in the net a sharp cross-court counter-punch forehand that had worked for him wonderfully in that set, up to that point. It was as if his elbow blew up to the size of a basketball and he could not freely swing anymore. All of a sudden, he was faced with two set points. Donaldson would only need one before Grigor would add in another unforced error, straight on the second shot after the serve.
It was a disastrous ending to an otherwise solid set on his part. He let Donaldson literally steal that third set.
Now back to more of what Grigor said pertaining to the consequences of that sequence. It had to do with him not losing his clarity despite that horrible ending to that set. He was not going to change his game plan just because of one game. For someone who has had a spring season filled with disappointments, it would be tempting to do so after making three straight unexpected errors to lose a crucial game against an underdog, and finding yourself one set away from another early exit from a Major.
Dimitrov did not fall into that trap: “I wanted to play my game the way I wanted to play my game with that margin of, you know, missing or making a winner. And I think for me that is important,” he said. It was the right decision, hats off to Grigor.
He won the fourth set in the same manner that he lost the third one, seizing on a bad sequence by Donaldson in one of the American’s serving games. Dimitrov expressed how important it was that he does not lose his game-plan clarity because of a few misses: “Okay, I missed. I missed. There’s still one set to be played and anything can happen. And it did happen, obviously, in the fourth set. I had a look. I seized that opportunity.”
In the fifth set, he found himself in the same position as he did in the third, not once, not twice, but three times, serving at 4-5, 5-6, and 6-7, to remain alive in the match. He held firm on all three occasions, hitting quality first and second serves. He was not going to let Donaldson sneak in another break, one that would have abruptly ended the match.
Then, Dimitrov had his own chance to wrap-up the Court-18 party when he broke his opponent’s serve at 7-7.
At that point, Donaldson’s physical condition was clearly diminished due to a cramping problem that reared its ugly head as early as the fourth set. It progressively got worse to the point where he could neither push off his left leg to serve nor run at 100% after balls in the extended moments of the final set.
Then, that 8-7 game made everyone ask “what?”
Donaldson went free-wheeling on his ground strokes, going for warp-speed on every shot, hitting one winner and forcing Dimitrov into three errors, to break back, out of nowhere. Grigor fans surely could not believe it. Never mind though. Their man had this, and his opponent was spent. Grigor broke serve again and finished the epic match in his next service game
It was epic and dramatically tight.
The point count ended at 176 to 170 for Dimitrov. At 8-8, it was at 169 for Donaldson, 168 for Dimitrov (Grigor won the last eight points of the match). That is how close the 4-hour-19-minute-long match was.
Donaldson performed at a high level for most of the match, really going after Dimitrov’s second serves on returns right off the gate. You could see a clear difference between how he prepared to return a first serve vs the second (see the photos below). Not only would he move up to the baseline to show Dimitrov his intention to attack, but he would also take two or three steps forward once the Bulgarian tossed the ball, aiming to fire the return.
It worked many times, not only to win that point in question, but to also cause havoc in Dimitrov’s mind, the next time he had to serve a second serve. If you are solely mad at Grigor for having served seven double faults in the first set, you are probably taking some credit away from Donaldson’s brilliant return tactics early in the match.
You may have also missed how effectively Dimitrov adjusted to circumvent that problem after the first set. He took pace off on some second serves (but added more spin) and he varied the target spots in the box. Donaldson was especially fond of catching the return at shoulder level on his backhand and pounding away, as in the third photo above. So, Dimitrov placed more serves in the “T” on the ad side or wide on the deuce side to make Donaldson stretch for some forehand returns (see below).
The point is, Dimitrov successfully responded to a challenge that was presented to him by a determined opponent. And that was after the catastrophic first-set tiebreaker (2-7) in which he made five errors – three of them unforced by my count**. His double fault count went from seven in the first set to a total of two for the next four sets. The positive news for Dimitrov are indeed in the details.
** In the name of avoiding repetition, see my previous Roland Garros match recaps – for example, this one – for an explanation on how I approach the unforced error count, and why I do so (I basically do my own count).
None of the above should be understood as an attempt on my part to argue that Dimitrov is in good form. I believe everyone, including Grigor himself, is aware of the fact that he has struggled not only this year, but in this particular match. The endings to the first and third sets were regrettable, and his backhand let him down at some crucial moments in the match. But it is not all full of gloom and doom as some people would have you believe, and the reason why is the central point that I tried to unpack in the above analysis.
I have mainly talked about Dimitrov, but make no mistake, Donaldson’s tactics and his performance deserve praise. I have already talked about his return plan above. He also worked Dimitrov’s backhand relentlessly, often winning the extended rallies. Don’t get me wrong. Deciding to work Grigor’s backhand is not an ingenious idea by itself. Every player is aware of his backhand being the weaker side from the baseline. What was well-planned was the way that Donaldson worked it.
He did not just feed the ball to the ad corner and make Dimitrov hit a bunch of backhands. For example, he would flatten the ball with his own backhand to Grigor’s, change pace and send one back high and deep, and add more topspin on the next shot. He would often accelerate to Grigor’s deuce corner, opening up the ad side, then hit the ball to the open ad-side on the next shot, get Dimitrov stretched to slice his backhand back, and use that opportunity to sneak up to the net and catch some of those floaters in the air for winners.
Granted, he missed some of those volleys (see the first point of the 3-2 game in the opening set), but that type of tactic is not designed for success on one or two points here and there. It is meant to make your opponent think twice every time he is stretched to hit a defensive backhand. Dimitrov did indeed miss some of those backhands, trying to keep the ball low over the net, expecting Donaldson to sneak in (see the 40-0 point at 3-3, opening point set).
For Donaldson, the match first took a downturn when, after stealing that third set on a bad game by Dimitrov, he turned around and served a dismal game of his own at 1-1 in the fourth set. He made five errors, three of them unforced, allowing Dimitrov to get ahead by a break and see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Then, when his physical condition began to deteriorate, his options for tactics got diminished (thus, the reason for which he went for rocket winners in the extended portions of the fifth set). He still fought valiantly and probably hoped for a steal – à-la third set, tenth game – in one of Dimitrov’s serving games in the late stages.
It did not happen because Dimitrov was no longer the Dimitrov of the late first or third sets. In fact, his body language in the last 30 minutes was exceptional. Being in good shape played a major role in his victory as he confirmed it himself, although not in those exact words: “when it really got down to the crucial moments, we played good tennis. But in the same time, I felt more fresh.”
Dimitrov’s next opponent is the always-dangerous Fernando Verdasco. It will be interesting to see how a high-IQ player like Dimitrov will tackle a situation in which the outcome may depend more on what version of his opponent will step on the court than what Grigor can do himself.
Mihaela Buzarnescu is one ‘heckuva’ player. She has dazzling shot-making skills that she is able to showcase thanks to her terrific footwork which allows her to get into the right position for every shot. She has the confidence to do well on any stage at this point, thanks to her impressive results over the last several months.
She has reached the only two WTA finals of her career this year (Hobart on hard courts, Prague on clay) and rapidly climbed up the WTA rankings from no.377 a year ago to number 33 currently. She is a crafty left-handed player who likes to control rallies and keep them short if possible. Thus, she will not shy away from using drops shots, taking a floating ball in the air for a put-away swing-volley, or coming to the net on any short balls that she manages to squeeze out of her opponent.
She took on Rebecca Peterson who can strike an impressive forehand and, if allowed, make her opponent chase one ball after another. The 97th-ranked Swede was playing her fifth match in one week, having come through qualifying rounds. In other words, Buzarnescu was facing against a player who, like her, preferred to take charge of rallies by powering up her ground strokes.
The good news for Buzarnescu was that, in just about every facet of the game, her skills to put that game plan to use were more developed than those of her opponent. This is precisely the type of match-up that often creates lop-sided numbers on the scoreboard, one in which both players build their A game plan on the same notion, but one party does everything a bit better than the other. Consequently, the better party negates the other’s strengths because the latter rarely ever gets a chance to use them.
Thus, the 6-1 6-2 victory for the Romanian player that lasted barely over an hour.
For example, Peterson did not get to control many rallies with her forehand, because she often found herself on defense, scrambling to retrieve Buzarnescu’s penetrating shots. She did not get to build the point on a solid first serve because Mihaela would fire the returns back, even if she missed one or two in the process – that partially explains why Peterson won less than half of the points started on her serve.
To Peterson’s credit, she recognized her opponent’s superiority in those areas in her post-match talk, but could not seem to do much about it: “It’s tough when someone is playing so solid as she did today. It’s tough to feel the rhythm to come in the match, to get the chance and the opportunities, I mean, I got no excuses, she played well.”
Believe it or not, there was an early moment in the match where Peterson had Buzarnescu in some trouble. She held her serve to start the match and went up 15-40 on Buzarnescu’s serve. The Romanian played her first dominant point of the match (Peterson dominated the early few rallies) and saved the first break point with a winning volley. On the 30-40 point, Peterson committed her only unforced backhand of the set. Who knew at that moment that it would be lights out for Peterson from that point forward?
It was indeed like if Buzarnescu suddenly shifted gears. She struck a forehand winner on the deuce point and followed it up with an exquisite 1-2-punch point to hold serve. The winners just kept coming. Buzarnescu hit 13 of them to win six games in a row and pocket the first set 6-1.
The same pattern continued until 2-0 in the second set. In that third game (and if you have watched Buzarnescu regularly, this will not come as a surprise), over what appeared to be a minor error in the grand scheme of things, Buzarnescu lost it.
Remember how Simona Halep was leading Jelena Ostapenko 3-0 in the final set of the 2017 Roland Garros final and got mad over one simple mistake? One from which she could not mentally recover quickly, and how that was partially responsible for why she let Ostapenko get back in the match on that day? Well, Buzarnescu pulled a Halep, except in much smaller scale, when she missed a forehand at 2-0, 15-0 in the second. It was neither a break point, nor a crucial one at that stage of the match. It was a mistake that allowed Peterson to get to 15-15 at a time in the match when Buzarnescu was on cruise control to win with ease.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Buzarnescu did not take it that way though.
She got mad and complained to herself for a good 10 seconds. If you did not know the score, you would have thought that the mistake cost her a break point in the late stages of a match. There was absolutely no need to have that kind of overblown reaction.
The first consequence of that kind of negativity coming out of nowhere is that it can carry over to the next point and take you out of cruise control. Well, it did…
She made another mistake at 15-15 and started to slam her racket to the ground out of anger but held back at the last second. She verbally complained some more. Two points later, Buzarnescu committed her third unforced error in four points to lose her serve. It was the only time she lost her serve, a game in which she committed almost half of her total number of unforced errors for the match. Bizarre, to say the least.
The second consequence of such an outburst is that the other player discovers hope where she thought there were none. Peterson, with renewed hope, followed that break with her best game of the match, holding serve on a forehand winner to get to 2-2.
Again, I ask: why? Why go berserk on an error at 6-1, 2-0, 15-0 when everything seems to be clicking on all cylinders? I am sure that is a question that Buzarnescu and her team have tackled. It does not change the fact that the glitch created by that one-error-related outburst took two full games to repair.
Fortunately for her – or, unfortunately for Peterson – Buzarnescu calmed down and she was able to buckle her belt and stick the landing. And the difference was so obvious! As soon as she focused back on business, she only lost five points from 2-2 to 6-2.
Buzarnescu’s next-round opponent is the fourth seed, and a possible candidate for the title, Elina Svitolina. No glitches or outbursts allowed!