Below is the link to my contribution to Tennis with an Accent —-> My post-match analysis of last year’s finalist Madison Keys’ decisive straight-set victory over Dominika Cibulkova in the fourth round of the US Open.
KEYS CLOSES THE DOOR ON CIBULKOVA
Until next time…
Once again, I am contributor to the Tennis with an Accent website today with my in-depth, post-match analysis of the high-quality clash between Angelique Kerber and Daria Kasatkina in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon on Tuesday.
Link: Kerber and the Intangibles
Until next time…
My write-up for Manic Monday at Wimbledon is now posted at the Tennis with an Accent website. I analyze Daria Kasatkina’s three-set win over Alison van Uytvanck in one of the more intriguing fourth-round match-ups in the women’s draw.
Link: Kasatkina Mindfully Maneuvers Past Van Uytvanck
Until next time…
In another thrilling upset, Hsieh Su-wei came back from a match point to defeat the top seed Simona Halep 3-6 6-4 7-5, and earn her spot in the fourth round coming up on Manic Monday at Wimbledon.
You can click here to read my match analysis on Tennis with an Accent website, a great source for Wimbledon and year-long tennis coverage.
Until next time…
Evgeniya Rodina (Q) def. Antonia Lottner (Q) 3-6 7-5 6-4
Antonia Lottner, the 21-year-old from Germany, has had a great grass-court season so far. Ranked at 128 in the WTA, she has slowly but surely began knocking on the door of a top-100 ranking for the first time in her young career. She did so, by winning four matches in s’Hertogenbosch as a qualifier – including an impressive straight-set victory over the second seed Elise Mertens (WTA no.15) – before losing in the quarterfinals to Viktoria Kuzmova.
Then, in Mallorca, she qualified again for the main draw and lost in the round of 16 to Anastasija Sevastova in three sets, after a convincing defeat over WTA no.51 Aliaksandra Sasnovich in straight sets.
She won three more qualifying-draw matches to earn her first Wimbledon main-draw appearance. With ten wins on grass in her pocket, the in-form Lottner drew Evgeniya Rodina (WTA no.120), another qualifier. It all seemed to fall into place for a great shot at a top-100 ranking and a breakthrough outing in this Major.
Except that her opponent – the 29-year-old Rodina – is a pesky competitor, a problem solver, and an experienced customer.
Lottner did begin the match on fire though. She hit three winners to break Rodina’s serve in the first game and added more from both wings until a bad game at 3-2 in which she double-faulted, framed a forehand, and sailed a backhand deep to lose her serve. Rodina went up 40-0 in the next game but Lottner came back to break and never looked back in the first set. She won it 6-3, producing 19 winners and an ace on the way.
The German kept going for her shots, making her opponent scramble and run balls down. Rodina could hardly gain any traction in rallies. The 6-foot-1-inch Lottner was serving big, nailing her forehands, even striking winners from low balls on her two-handed backhand, which required her to really bend her knees.
Don’t get me wrong, Rodina can get a lot of balls back and frustrate opponents. This defensive type of play is not a challenge from which she runs away as a player. But on grass, against a hard-hitting opponent that was clicking on all cylinders, she needed to modify her tactics. It may put her in an uncomfortable style of play, but it was necessary. And Rodina is the type of player that would definitely be on board with “uncomfortable,” if it means that it can turn the tide in her favor.
So, the Russian began to get aggressive with her groundstrokes at the cost of making more errors, which she did. After recording only six unforced errors in the first set, she made 11 in the second**. But she also began sinking her teeth into the match, because she started to take away the comfortable take-a-step-forward-and-nail-the-winner routine that Lottner had adopted since the match began.
**I do my own count of unforced errors for reasons that I have expressed many times in the past. Well, there is more coming a bit later in this piece. There are several things that stat people in counting unforced/forced errors, with which I disagree strongly. You will see me underline one of those reasons. Bear with me.
Rodina started going for bigger returns on Lottner’s serves. She also began hitting down-the-line more, to counter the way her opponent was moving into the court to cut off the cross-court ones. Lottner began finding herself chasing balls sideways (or backward) and her one visible weakness – a slow first step which makes it hard for her to change direction – began to surface. Rodina hit nine winners in the second set (vs three in the first) and that does not include the times she forced Lottner into errors because the German was having to hit bigger shots from behind the baseline, instead of hitting them from inside the court like in the first set.
None of this guaranteed a comeback for Rodina. It simply allowed her to remain on serve in the second set. In fact, at 4-5 down, Lottner had a legitimate chance to close out the match on her return game. At the 15-30 point, on a short second serve by Rodina, Lottner stepped inside the court for a winner attempt. She slammed the forehand return in the net. Rodina won the next point to go up 40-30, and held serve to equalize at 5-5, thanks to another forehand return missed in the net by Lottner.
These were not errors caused by Rodina’s good serves. Lottner missed them while attempting to go for winners. She then lost her service game – the only break of the second set – and Rodina extended the match to a third set by holding hers. In a matter of less than ten minutes, Rodina went from being two points away from losing the match in a routine straight-set affair to being leveled at one set each.
Let me pause for a moment and focus on Lottner’s forehand return errors. She had previously missed three of them in the very first game of the second set, two of which were winner attempts on Rodina’s second serves. Apparently, that was only the beginning. She continued to miss forehand returns – very makable ones – throughout the rest of the match.
It was the one glaring error-prone area in her game. I understand that putting pressure on Rodina’s serve by returning big was part of her game, but when you miss that much, should you not perhaps consider a more conservative return, one that goes higher over the net and simply lands deep by the baseline, so that you can perhaps set up your winner attempt on the next shot? Instead, she kept firing one risky forehand return after another.
And she kept missing one forehand return after another.
Lottner made ten “unforced”** forehand-return errors in the second set alone. She added eight more to the tally in the final set. I noted earlier how Rodina was willing to make the “uncomfortable” adjustment if it were necessary. Lottner was not, did not.
**Stay with me, and you will see why I have “unforced” in quotation marks.
The adjustment Rodina made after the first set ended, in the meantime, began to bear fruit. Rallies were a lot different in the third set than in the first. You no longer saw Lottner inside the court, directing rallies and finishing them off with winners that she got to strike from inside the baseline. Instead, you saw both player hitting hard in punch-to-punch rallies, and Rodina having more and more to say about their patterns. It also helped that Rodina’s first-serve percentage was at a spectacular 91% (31 out of 34) in the final set, while Lottner’s first-serve percentage got progressively worse throughout the match (73%-64%-60% for the three sets).
Rodina made ten unforced errors in the final set, which was in line with the adjustment in her aggressiveness after the first set ended. Lottner, for her part, made 16 unforced errors on her forehand alone, with eight of them being on returns. And that brings me to my last discussion point – or, my rant, I shall say.
My regular readers know how much I complain about the way unforced-error stats are kept. Double faults are counted as unforced errors sometimes, while return and passing-shot-attempt errors are never counted regardless of the circumstances. This match is a great example of how stats fail to emphasize the most significant number of this match.
You look at the official stats and you see nine forehand unforced errors for Lottner in the second set, and ten in the third. Well, my count would be closer to that, if I were NOT to count routine forehand errors made by Lottner on RETURNS.
I am sorry but if the opponent hits a mid-pace second serve that sits right there for the returner to nail a routine shot, and yet she misses it, that should get recorded as an unforced error. In fact, it is obvious that Lottner was considering them as sitters, because she would painlessly step inside the baseline and go for winners. When you add the errors that she made on those returns into the count, you get Lottner with 16 unforced forehand errors in the second set, and 15 in the third, instead of nine and ten.
More importantly, you understand that it was not forehands in general that were causing the short circuit in Lottner’s game. It was her forehand returns. The devil is in the details folks. Stats should reflect every detail that counts.
Rodina ended up winning the match 3-6 7-5 6-4 in two hours and one minute.
It was a terrific comeback by the Russian who appeared to be outmatched for almost two sets. However – and I apologize for quoting myself from earlier –, Rodina is a pesky competitor, a problem solver, and an experienced customer. The Russian is not a great athlete, but she has won many matches of this type in her career, during which she fabricates a way to turn things around against seemingly superior talent. She remains underrated in this sense, quite frankly. Here is a match – one among many in her career – where she was willing to do what is necessary, no matter how uncomfortable, and come out on top.
She will next take on Sorana Cirstea who pulled one of the early upsets of the tournament by defeating the 19th-seeded (and last year’s semifinalist) Magdalena Rybarikova in straight sets.
Until next time…
Simona Halep defeats Sloane Stephens 3-6 6-4 6-1
There will be a number of well-written pieces focusing on the stories of Saturday’s two women’s finalists at Roland Garros, especially on Simona Halep who handed Sloane Stephens her first loss in the finals of a tournament by a score of 3-6 6-4 6-1.
Therefore, I will pass on that angle and jump straight into the nitty-gritty of what happened on the court over the course of the 2 hours and three minutes that it took for these two champions to carry the match to its conclusion.
When two exceptional baseline players like Halep and Stephens face each other, first few games are critical. One cannot afford to have a slow start, because that would not only mean that she is allowing the other to get ahead on the scoreboard, but it may also give her the false sense that the other player is better than her from the baseline – read that, beating her at her own game – and trick her into making a premature tactical adjustment.
Although both players made it through the first three games with around the same number of unforced errors**, Halep committed three of them in the third game alone, two in a row from 30-30 to lose her serve and go down 1-3. She started the next game with two more unforced errors which eventually led to Stephens confirming the break and going up 4-1. Sloane never relinquished the lead and took the first set 6-3.
**Usual disclaimer: I keep my own count of the unforced errors, double faults are not included.
Because of the timing of those few errors by Simona, Sloane led by a set in the scoreboard and appeared to be the superior baseliner up to that point in the match, holding precisely the kind of edge that I mentioned above.
Of course, I can never be sure of what exactly what goes through a player’s mind, but Halep already appeared to be looking for solutions in the latter part of the first set.
For example, during a long rally in the 15-15 point of the 4-2 game, Halep threw everything but the kitchen sink at Stephens in terms of varying the height and pace of her shots. She hit some shots with heavy topspin, added some mid-pace high-loopers, and squeezed in a flat, hard forehand. She won that point, but in the next one, Stephens answered right back with a dandy of a forehand. Then, Halep missed the return deep, and Stephens put the game away with a clean forehand winner.
Just like in that game, even when Halep found a pattern that temporarily worked, she struggled to replicate it point after point against a player who is on fire. All those rallies in the first set must have felt to Stephens like they were taking place in the comfort of her living room, simply because she had the lead. I remind everyone that she did not start out that way, committing six unforced errors in the first two games. If you think she played a flawless first set, think again. She played a flawless after she got the lead at 3-1. In fact, if you watch the first two games and the last four in that set, you would believe that it’s a 50-50 affair.
However, context is everything, and the first set did not feel like it went neck-to-neck. Stephens appeared to be dominating. So, Halep looked for answers in her bag of solutions. She did not lose her cool** and pursued different paths to come up with a working formula, even though Stephens was operating as smoothly as possible.
**Let’s please put the “she freezes” or the “she crumbles under the moment” narrative away for good.
Again, this is my observation and I cannot know for sure what goes through a player’s head, but as soon as the second set began, it appeared as if Halep turned extremely aggressive and began nailing as many shots as possible.
The problem was that, in her attempt to play a riskier brand of tennis, she either went for some low-percentage shots and missed (see the 15-15 point in the first game, when she tried to hit too perfect a forehand down-the-line while backing up far behind the baseline) or Sloane produced some five-star counterpunches to negate Simona’s aggressiveness (see the very next point at 15-30, Halep hits three high-octane shots in a row, but Sloane gets them back and puts the fourth one away with a backhand down-the-line rocket. See also the second deuce point in the same game for yet another such example).
Down 3-6 0-2, Simona persevered and dug even deeper for a solution. She tried moving forward on floaters, winning three points in that game thanks to swing-volleys. She held serve, but she was still down a set and a break. There was no doubt that her on-court IQ was in overdrive and calculations would not end until she found one.
Until that point, Halep used mixed patterns for the most part (whether consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know), meaning that, she did not specifically work Stephens’s forehand or backhand, but switched back and forth a lot, targeting the open spots (see the 30-15 point at 5-2 in the first set if you prefer to see an example). No “triangle patterns”** were to be found in her shots.
** It is a term used – by some coaches and pros – to make allusion to the triangle trajectory of the ball going back-and-forth when one player stands on one side of the court and moves the other player around. The moving player is expected to run every ball down and send them back to the same corner on the other side. It’s your conventional consistency drill left over from the 70s and 80s that centers on building accuracy in your strokes while working on your stamina.
When Stephens was serving at 2-1, and Halep led 0-30, it was the first conspicuous use of triangle tennis that I saw in the second set. Halep hit seven shots in a row to Stephens’s backhand before accelerating the next one to her forehand. Stephens missed the forehand in the net. The seven shots hit by Halep were not intended to be winners. In fact, a couple of them were mid-pace, topspin shots that Sloane could easily send back. When time came to step in and accelerate for Halep though, she went after Sloane’s forehand and collected the error.
Halep began to adopt this pattern more and more frequently during rallies.
Granted, Stephens put together her worst sequence from 2-1 up to 2-4 down in that second set and made a bunch of unforced errors. So, the turn-around cannot be attributed to Halep’s variation of the triangle by any means, but it must have helped her mentally to discover a pattern that works in her favor, because she repeatedly went back to it, even if she lost a few of those points (see the 30-0 point at 4-3 for Halep).
Halep played three more points using that pattern in the 4-4 game, working Sloane’s backhand side with mixed pace, then accelerating to her forehand side. In the 15-0 point of the 5-4 game, Halep hit five shots to the ad side, four of them being regular-paced deep shots, and two accelerations to Sloane’s forehand side, the second of which collected an error from the American’s racket.
Halep began the final set in the same vein as she looked to force the same pattern in five out of six points in the first game (the other one was a return miss by Stephens). Again, Sloane’s deuce side of the court was only targeted for accelerations. Otherwise, Halep kept a steady flow of clean, measured, topspin shots coming to Sloane’s backhand side. On the 40-30 point, Halep hit five “safe” but deep shots to Stephens’s backhand and followed it up with another acceleration to her forehand. Stephens’s forehand clipped the net and kicked up, giving the advantage to Halep. Two shots later, Halep put the ball away and led 1-0 in the third.
In the second game, three more points were directed in this pattern by Halep. At 30-40, she sent another high topspin to Sloane’s backhand corner and got a short ball back from the American. She stepped in and nailed the ball to the deuce side. Sloane got to it but returned the defensive forehand in the net. Halep now led 2-0.
In the last point of the next game, Halep hit seven out of the last ten shots to Stephens’s backhand side (only accelerating one) and hit the other three hard to her forehand side. The point ended with an error by Stephens. Halep now led 3-0.
I could go on and on with more examples, but you get the idea. If you thought that Stephens’s backhand was a major problem for her in this match because of the amount of errors she committed (12 forehands, 21 backhands by my count – officially it’s 13 and 25), you were only partially right. When using this pattern, Halep actually banked on collecting errors from her forehand side, especially on the accelerations. It worked more than once, on important points.
This also took away one of Stephens’s favorite activities, which is to hit counterpunches on the move. Instead, she remained static in one spot for a string of two or three shots (or more) and engaged in rallies where she had to fabricate the pace, or else she would find herself under pressure when she hit a short ball.
Fans of Stephens must be disappointed, and they are probably focusing on the three bad games in the middle portion of the second set. They are right in that Sloane’s level did go down. But surely, it would have been too optimistic to expect her to stay at the level she played during the first hour.
Plus, Halep’s come-back win cannot be entirely attributed to the three-game bad streak by Stephens. Halep deserves a lot of credit because she remained cool-headed while trailing for almost 45 minutes against an opponent who was not only playing high-quality tennis but also answering the call every time Halep made an adjustment in an attempt to turn the match around. Halep persisted, persevered, persisted, and won.
If anyone has anything to say to me about Halep lacking on-court IQ from this moment forward, they can bet that I will throw the “Roland Garros 2018 final” card right back at them.