Angie in the Arena

Recent form. It’s one of the crutches that all tennis prognosticators use as we try to peer into the unknown and predict who will win a match. But it’s one of our fallacies, as well.

If a player is in the middle of a hot streak, does that mean she’ll stay hot for one more day, or does it mean she’s due, as everyone is at some point, to cool off? Can one player beat another every single time? How much does the result of a tiny tune-up event mean for the more pressure-packed Grand Slam to follow?

These are the questions that every tennis pundit must ponder, and they were the ones I asked before Wednesday’s quarterfinal between Victoria Azarenka and Angelique Kerber. In this case, Azarenka was the player on the hot streak. She hadn’t lost a set this season, and she’d won the warm-up event in Brisbane with a 6-3, 6-1 victory over Kerber in the final. On the men’s side, Brisbane had proven to be prophetic. The winner, Milos Raonic, has continued to show off the same newly-complete game that he used to beat Roger Federer in the final there.

Going into their quarterfinal in Melbourne, Azarenka had won all six of her previous meetings against Kerber. Was No. 7 a lock? As of Wednesday morning, that was the conventional wisdom.

And then Kerber won, 6-3, 7-5. She was the one who was in control at the start, the one who built a 4-0 lead in the first set, and the one who saved five set points to come back from 2-5 down in the second. It was the normally-defensive Kerber who hit more winners (31 to 28) and more aces (four to two), and who broke serve six times. It was Kerber who caught her opponent off guard with down-the-line forehands and serves up the T. It was Kerber, with her fast start and faster finish, with her ability to bend but not break, who played like the favorite.

With 20/20 hindsight, we can see where the conventional wisdom went wrong. More specifically, we can see the problem with basing any prediction on what happened the last time two players faced each other. Rather than instilling Azarenka with more confidence, the Brisbane final motivated Kerber and helped her learn what she needed to do to change the result.

Of course, Kerber has understood for a long time that she needs to attack more against Azarenka, that she needs to do something other than just get the ball back over the net. But the one-sided score of her Brisbane loss brought the point home and made it clear that she had no choice in the matter. From the beginning in Melbourne, Kerber has stood closer to the baseline and hit a crisper ball from both sides.

“I was playing my game from the first point,” said Kerber, who took heart from her close loss to Azarenka at last year’s U.S. Open. “Also when I was down 2-5, I was actually playing more aggressive this time. I think that was the key.

“I was trying, you know, to focus on my game, to be aggressive, to be the player who makes the winners and who is going for it...Against top players like Vika you must go for it.”

Kerber also cited the support she got last year during a hitting session with one of her idols, Steffi Graf.

"She taught me, actually, that I'm on a good way," Kerber said, "and try to believe in myself."

Watching Kerber step forward to hit a series of clean winners in the second set, though, I thought of some advice that Graf's husband, Andre Agassi, likes to give: "Racquet-head speed is your friend." In other words,  while it may sound counterintuitive, the faster you swing on a putaway shot the safer that shot is going to be, because of the spin you put on the ball. Federer and his forehand have lived by these words his entire career. Kerber, who tends to decelerate and push when things get tight, lived by them on Wednesday.

Azarenka, not surprisingly, had a different reaction afterward, and a diametrically opposed opinion of her own performance.

“I think I was a little bit too flat today,” Vika said. “Personally, it was 10 percent not enough of everything. My footwork didn’t have enough. My shots didn’t have enough...That’s not going to win matches in quarterfinals. You have to bring it, and I didn’t.”

From a stat perspective, the one that sticks out for Azarenka is her 33 errors, compared to Kerber’s 16. Vika said she didn’t “commit” enough to her shots; to me, she seemed to struggle the most with putaways. She worked a rally to the stage where she could go for the kill, and then, too often, she missed. By the end, she was gun-shy. Down break point at 5-4 in the second, having already squandered five chances to win the set, she took a short backhand and, instead of ripping it the way she usually does, guided it right back to Kerber, who sent an easy pass up the line.

Azarenka was a popular choice to win this tournament; I picked her myself. Now I look back and see that she hasn’t reached the semis at a Grand Slam since 2013. Vika is injury free, playing well, and winning tournaments again, and her ranking is going to rise. But here and at the U.S. Open, she let quarterfinal matches slip from her grasp and lost to players—Kerber in Melbourne and Simona Halep in New York—that she hadn’t lost to before. Did all of the tough draws and tough losses to Serena in 2015 set her confidence back when it comes to finishing big matches? We’ll learn more as she plays more of them this year.

When it comes to big matches on big stages, this was a breakthrough for Kerber. She hadn’t been to a Grand Slam semi since 2012, and last year she won four smaller titles while failing to get past the third round at any major. That dispiriting trend looked set to continue in Australia when she faced a match point in the opening round against Misaki Doi. Not unlike Li Na, who won the Aussie Open two years ago after saving a match point early in the event, Kerber’s resurrection against Doi has propelled her through the event. On some level, everything must feel like a bonus after that near-loss experience.

In her post-match interview on court, an ecstatic Kerber, talking quickly and sounding emotional, spoke about how thrilled she was to play in front of the crowd in Rod Laver Arena; her voice rose, as if she were trying to do justice to how the atmosphere felt to her. Kerber hasn’t played in many main stadiums at Slams in recent years, and she had a similarly euphoric reaction when she played, and lost to, Azarenka in Arthur Ashe Stadium last year.

Before today, the conventional wisdom was that Kerber couldn’t handle the big stages, that her game was too small for them. On Wednesday, we watched her game fill the stage in Laver. Hindsight, as always, is 20/20.