Home » October, 2011 Entries posted on “October, 2011”

Federer returns, cruises in Swiss event (AP)

Roger Federer made a winning return from a six-week break, beating Potito Starace of Italy 7-6 (3), 6-4 in the first round of his hometown Swiss Indoors event on Monday. The fourth-ranked Federer took time to find the rhythm in his ground strokes, and saved a break point at 5-all before winning the first-set tiebreaker comfortably.

October 31 2011 | Posted in Yahoo! Tennis | Read More »

Djokovic: I need time to regain top form (AP)

Novak Djokovic says he needs time to regain his form after a season in which he won three majors was cut short because of back injury that sidelined him six weeks. The top-ranked Serb resumes play at the Swiss Indoors with a 64-3 record this year. A muscle injury forced him to retire from a Davis Cup singles semifinal against Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina on Sept.

October 31 2011 | Posted in Yahoo! Tennis | Read More »

Davydenko upsets Simon in Spain (AP)

Nikolay Davydenko beat fifth-seeded Gilles Simon 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 on Monday in the first round of the Valencia Open, hurting the Frenchman’s chances of qualifying for the ATP World Tour Finals. Davydenko hit a forehand winner to go up a break at 2-1 in the deciding set and used a drop shot to save a break point in the sixth game.

October 31 2011 | Posted in Yahoo! Tennis | Read More »

Melzer skipping 2 tourneys due to back (AP)

Jurgen Melzer has pulled out of the Swiss Indoors in Basel and Paris Masters because of a back injury, ending his singles season and raising doubts if he can play doubles at next month’s season-ending ATP Finals in London. Melzer’s manager, Ronnie Leitgeb, told the Austria Press Agency on Monday that it’s “a very difficult decision to probably end the season here, but it’s his…

October 31 2011 | Posted in Yahoo! Tennis | Read More »

No. 1 Without a Bullet

by Pete Bodo

It's hard to imagine that certain records will ever be broken. There's Pete Sampras's six consecutive years as the year-end no. 1, a record at which every player from now on will only have one reasonable shot. How about Roger Federer's 237 consecutive weeks at no. 1, starting in February of 2004? And it's hard to conceive of a woman duplicating Martina Navratilova's dominance at Wimbledon: she won the title nine times, but just as impressive she was in the final 12 times, including 9 times in a row.

You can add Caroline Wozniacki's accomplishment to that list, now that she's guaranteed to finish no. 1 no matter what happens in this final week in Bali, at the Tournament of Also Ra – er, Tournament of Champions.

It's hard to imagine any woman capturing the no. 1 ranking two years in a row without having won a single Grand Slam event.

It took unusual if not inexplicable or act-of-God circumstances to make that possible, chief among them an astonishing combination of week-in/week-out consistency by Wozniacki and a concomitant inability by Wozniacki to deliver the goods at the most propitious – and appropriate – of times. That is, at the biggest and best of events, first and foremost the four Grand Slams.

And it isn't as if Wozniacki accomplished her record this with smoke and mirrors. Part of the credit, or blame, for her status goes to her rivals – Serena Williams, for being unable to compete for long periods (usually due to injury); Maria Sharapova, for her inability to overcome the after-effects of a shoulder injury; Li Na, for sputtering out at all but the major events; Kim Clijsters, for failing to play frequently enough, and also suffering injuries. . . You can go on with the list, but you get the drift.

Wozniacki managed to retain the number 1 ranking because she was extremely reliable in typical tour events. She won six titles in 2010 and 2011, and won one more match this year than last (she was 63-17 for 2011) with the same number of losses. Yet her major rivals closed the gap between no. 1 and the rest of the field significantly.

Kvitova, now no. 2, trails Wozniacki by a mere 115 ranking points (that's the equivalent of a round-of 16 finish at a Premier 5 event), despite playing three fewer tournaments. And it's that close because the 21-year old Czech won two of the five biggest events on the calendar: Wimbledon, and the just-concluded WTA Championships in Istanbul – the grand finale featuring the eight best players. Kvitova didn't run out of steam, and she didn't run out of luck. What she seemed to have run out of was time.

Where was Wozniacki at the finish line in Istanbul? Sidelined before the round-robin stage was completed, mostly because she was crushed by Kvitova in her first match 4-and-2 and outlasted in three sets by the other semifinalist to emerge from her group, Vera Zvonareva. In the majors, Wozniacki fared much better, but she was still an unconvincing no. 1.

She was a semifinalist twice, taking losses to Li Na (Australian Open) and Serena Williams (U.S. Open) – note that neither of those women went on to win those events. Granted, Wozniacki was the victim of bad luck at the French Open, where mercurial Daniela Hantuchova caught fire and blasted Wozniacki off the court (much like Hantuchova might have destroyed anyone else on the day), 6-1, 6-3. The biggest, most painful loss – and blown opportunity – for Wozniacki was the round-of-16 defeat at the hands of Dominika Cibulkova. The winner was no veteran, having a career day, al la Hantuchova, nor a dangerous talent on the cusp of a career year, a la Li. It was a close,three-set match in which Wozniacki failed to step up.

As if she doesn't have enough to think about as Wozniacki contemplates the upcoming year, Victoria Azarenka is also breathing down her neck. Azarenka is almost exactly a year older than Kvitova or Wozniacki, who are both 21. Azarenka finished just 965 points behind Wozniacki; that's the equivalent of a title at a Premier Mandatory event – or just 35 ticks shy of Grand Slam semifinal points. Azarenka played 21 events, one fewer than Wozniacki and two more than Kvitova. In the top 10, only one player played more tournaments than Wozniacki and Zvonareva; that was Marion Bartoli, who logged a staggering 28 events (I think Bali might boost her to 29). Wouldn't you love to have her frequent flyer miles?

So it's pretty clear that the posse is catching up with Wozniacki, although she still leads Kvitova 3-2 in head-to-head meetings, and has a comparable 4-2 lead on Azarenka. But. . . Kvitova is just 21, and while just one of their confrontations happened this year (at the WTA Championships), she won on the two biggest occasions (the other one was Wimbledon, 2010).

It's also clear that while everyone will start fresh in Australian in about two months time, Wozniacki and her rivals are in dramatically different shoes. Wozniacki will be looking to create momentum, while Kvitova and Azarenka will be attempting to build on the momentum accrued at the end of this year. Wozniacki did not just finish in disappointing fashion; she was downright lousy, given her ranking and what steam she seemed to gather when she recovered from a summer swoon to win New Haven and make the semis at the U.S. Open. After that last major, Wozniacki was a tepid 5-4 for the rest of the year. The defeats leading up to the WTA Championships can't be termed quality losses, either. She lost to no. 43 Kaia Kanepi in Tokyo, and in Beijing it was no. 26 Flavia Pennetta.

So it looks like the main story line in the WTA as 2012 gets underway will be the hunt for the no. 1 ranking. Whatever else happens, we know that Wozniacki, while admirably consistent, failed to consolidate the year-end no. 1 ranking she gathered up in 2010. Had Wozniacki won a major, or two of the five main events (as did Kvitova), she would have laid to rest all those futile but understandable speculations about the degree to which the ranking reflected the reality. But it's good to keep in mind that Wozniacki can't be held accountable for the other women failing to strip her of that ranking.

The prospects for Wozniacki will be daunting; she will have more than three times the number of ranking points to defend than either Kvitova or Azarenka in the first three-plus months of next year. And chances of Wozniacki coming up with a magic bullet – or anything as lethal as a regular bullet – are slim. When you consider the growing conviction that she needs to play with more purposeful aggression, that she might benefit from flattening out her forehand in order to make it more of a tool with which to dictate, that she hasn't really found the coach who can take her game and attitude to that elusive next level. . . when you take all that into account, it becomes clear that she will have her work cut out.

No matter what happens, though, nobody can take her record away, and it's unlikely that we'll see any woman duplicate it any time soon. Which may be a good thing.

October 31 2011 | Posted in Tennis.com Blog | Read More »

What Came Next

How you typically picture a certain player says a lot about them. I think of Novak Djokovic skidding for a backhand save. I think of Martina Navratilova on the full, flying run toward the net. I think of John McEnroe making contact with his serve, a grimace of effort across his face.

With Petra Kvitova, I start by trying not to think of the celebratory yelp—or is it a word in Czech?—that she has begun to make after each winning point. Instead, I begin by blocking that sound out and thinking of her leaning forward at the baseline, eyes wide, feet restless, impatiently waiting for her opponent to serve so she can knock the ball back down her throat. Kvitova has been compared to Navratilova because her lefty-ness and her nationality. She's been compared to Lindsay Davenport because of the aggressive heft of her shots. But seeing her ready to return, I think of Monica Seles, another lefty who lived for the chance to bash one more ball.

Fans of Kvitova's might wish that the 21-year-old Czech, who cemented her place as the WTA’s Player of the Year—official or unofficial—with her sixth title of the season in Istanbul on Sunday, weren’t quite so restless and impatient. They might wish that she wouldn’t always go for the first strike, or hit virtually every ball at full throttle. It would, if nothing else, probably make her matches a lot less time-consuming to watch, because the quality of her play wouldn’t swing quite so wildly, so often. But that return stance, and that impatience to batter the next ball, is what Kvitova is all about—sometimes for worse, mostly for better, soon for best.

Great champions from McEnroe to Nadal have been known as perfectionists—they don’t like to make a mistake. Kvitova so far has won with anti-perfectionism. She sacrifices consistency and point-construction for raw power and risky placement. She knows she can hit a winner with any shot when her feet are set, so that’s mostly what she tries to do. In one sense, if you think of the old advice, “play to your strengths,” this is a smart move.

Because what sets Kvitova apart from her peers, or at least the peers who made it to Turkey, is her ability to hit blatant winners, so why shouldn’t she try to maximize that? Kvitova’s ground strokes are also fairly flat and penetrating, rather than safely, smoothly spinny. In the future, developing a safer rally shot, one that allows her to be patient, to choose her spots to be aggressive rather than taking the first opportunity, may allow her to become a dominant No. 1. For now, though, I’ve never seen a great player with so little in-between game or neutral gear. Kvitova makes all of her shots, and then something snaps and she misses all of her shots. Yesterday she broke out of the gates and won the first five games from Victoria Azarenka; she lost the next five almost as quickly. Unlike Seles when she was dialed in and at her best, so far the price of Kvitova’s tremendous shot-making is an extremely low margin for error. What makes her great is what makes her awful.

But what makes Kvitova great is exactly what her opponent, Azarenka, lacks. I’ve speculated that as good as Vika is, as much as she’s improved both physically and mentally this year, and as much heart as she showed in making two major comebacks in the Istanbul final, she doesn't have the one thing that most Slam winners have in common—the ability to take the racquet out of her opponent’s hand. The ability, in other words, to win points outright, whether it’s with a serve or a forehand, and not rely on the other person to help out with a miss. Azarenka does have power, especially when she can step into a backhand, but her game is about moving the ball around and using her athleticism to eventually outplay an opponent in a rally. What she lacks is the killer punch from anywhere. Through the first two sets, Azarenka controlled many of the rallies, but often couldn’t convert them with a putaway. I won’t go so far as to say that she’ll never win a major, but it won’t be easy for her.

The start of the third set was a perfect nutshell example of what separates these two players. In the first game, Kvitova faced four break points—she had just lost the second set and the match appeared for a second to by slipping away from her. But she rallied on the strength of good serving and, more important, forehand winners. In the following game, it was Azarenka's turn to face a break point. Like Kvitova, she set up for a forehand into a wide-open court. Unlike Kvitova, when Azarenka let loose with it, she sent it 10 feet long. Kvitova had a one-break lead that she wouldn’t surrender.

These two players are 21 and 22, they’re ranked No. 2 and No. 3 in the world, and they fairly dominated this tournament in the absence of Serena Williams and Kim Clijsters. We’ll see what happens when the latter two elder stateswoman return, but there's a new WTA generation shaping up at the top of the rankings. While its third member, Caroline Wozniacki, held onto her No. 1 spot this week, Istanbul felt like the moment when Kvitova, who went 5-0, passed everyone else on the outside. Her winners were obviously impressive, and she showed more touch around the net than she ever has—how about that McEnroe-esque sharp-angled backhand volley winner while turning her body in the other direction? Kvitova is adding to her list of shots that very few, if any, of her opponents can match.

What I liked most, and what seemed different, was how determined she was to battle her way through the bad patches. In the final, it wasn’t Kvitova’s return or her forehand that got her to the finish line. It was that ultimate first-strike shot, the serve. On crucial points coming down the stretch, she swung it wide in the deuce court, and Azarenka had no answer for it—the racquet was essentially out of her hand. This was a more patient and tactical Kvitova than we've seen.

Next Martina, next Lindsay, next Monica, next No. 1? Next exasperatingly inconsistent talent, or next dominant champion? After watching Kvitova light up Istanbul for a week, after seeing more finesse and a champion’s finishing grit, I’d say we just what was next from her. I'm looking forward to whatever comes after that.