Sometimes the way to turn a match around is very simple, at least according to Simona Halep.
“I knew I had to change my tactics,” Halep said after her whiplash-inducing 0-6, 6-3, 6-1 win over Rogers Cup defending champion Agnieszka Radwanska on Friday in Toronto. “So I just kept the ball inside the court and made more rallies out there.”
Keeping the ball inside the court: That’s usually a good place to start.
Halep did that, and eventually much more, as she backed up one grueling three-set win, over Angelique Kerber on Thursday, with another less than 24 hours later.
“At the beginning I couldn’t move my legs,” Halep said after beating Radwanska for her 300th career win. By the end, she had reached her first semifinal since May, in what has also been a whiplash-inducing season for her.
As her erratic 2015 record attests, it hasn’t always been easy for the 23-year-old Romanian to know how to approach her game or her career. As late as 2013, despite winning six titles that year, Halep was a virtual unknown, with a ranking that hovered in the 50s. But after reaching the final of the French Open and the semis at Wimbledon the following year, and bageling Serena Williams in a set, she had vaulted out of the WTA pack, out of anonymity, all the way up to No. 2 in the world.
“She went through changes this year as a person,” her former coach, Wim Fissette, told the Romania Journal late in 2014. “At the beginning of the season she was a shy girl, but at the end of the year she was a world star.”