A few weeks ago, I wrote about an astonishing flip-flop that has occurred in pro tennis. It wasn’t so long ago that variety was the hallmark of the men’s game, with a serve-and-volleyer here, an all-court baseliner there, a clay-court grinder somewhere else. Meanwhile, most WTA players looked as if they had been punched out of the same template, doomed to limited success with tiresome, conservative games, identical two-handed backhands, and near-universally shared serving woes.
My, how different it is now—a point that was vividly illustrated once again at the Australian Open. But before we get into that, I’ll add that this florescence of variety might also be rubbing off on the men’s game, especially with the “wise men”—Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker, and Goran Ivanisevic—now helping to determine the tone of the game as coaches. It seems that “volley” is no longer a forbidden word in the game’s vocabulary, but we’ll leave that topic for another time.
Right now, there’s really only one great WTA player whose game can be described as one-dimensional in the same way that so many women players were one-dimensional two or three decades ago, and that’s Victoria Azarenka. Against quality opposition, her serve will always be vulnerable. Against most everyone else, and often those elites, her straight-on power and consistency will usually do the job.
That isn’t meant as a slight; a “one-dimensional” win is worth just as many rankings points and dollars as a multi-faceted one, and one-speed tennis can have plenty of appeal when it’s matched with a game that can turn the power of that game against itself—as Agniezska Radwanska demonstrated in her dazzling quarterfinal win over Azarenka.
The other quarterfinalists this year constituted a grab-bag of styles and playing sensibilities so diverse that they’re worth noting. Simona Halep continued to build on her outstanding 2013 season. At 5’6”, she’s on the small side in today’s game, but she’s a fierce ball-striker and blasted her way to the quarters, where she was out-hit by an even smaller dynamo, losing finalist Dominika Cibulkova, who tops out at all of 5’3”.
Two things were interesting about how that all played out: First, that two women of such small stature would bring such big games to the dance and, second, that neither of them looked anything like a “surprise” quarterfinalist. Back in the day, there were women cut from similar cloth as these two; tennis throughout the years has pretty successfully resisted the tempting theory that being big is an advantage. But they played with nothing like the command and conviction of these women, and usually left the quarters or semis at the wrong end of a love-and-two scoreline.
Halep punched her ticket into the quarters with an impressive win over the bigger, more mobile, and more versatile Jelena Jankovic, who had lost just 14 games and zero sets up to that point. On her way to the final, Cibulkova advanced at the expense of two Top 5 players who couldn’t be more different from her, or from each other—Maria Sharapova and Radwanska. If Cibulkova was a “surprise” finalist, it was in name only.
By the semis, No. 2 Azarenka, No. 13 Sloane Stephens, No. 10 Caroline Wozniacki, No. 3 Sharapova, and No. 6 Jankovic had all been eliminated from the lower portion of the draw. Things weren’t much better in the top half, where the casualties included No. 1 Serena Williams, No. 7 Sara Errani, No. 9 Angelique Kerber, and No. 6 Petra Kvitova. And while all the top half’s quarterfinalists were seeded, only one was actually seeded to reach that stage—the eventual champ, No. 4 Li Na.
That Ana Ivanovic managed to beat Serena was the big news in the top half, but the kicker is that the former Grand Slam champion was unable to advance further. She lost to the breakout WTA player of the tournament, No. 30 seed Eugenie Bouchard.