How Halep came from the brink and showed off a plan B to beat Vinci

“Are you OK?” Simona Halep’s coach, Darren Cahill, asked her.

It was a good question. Halep had won the first set over Roberta Vinci, but things had quickly spun out of control in the second. Now she was staring at a decider against the 34th-ranked, 34-year-old Italian, who had managed just one win over the last three months.

This was not a match that Halep could be OK with losing. She’s defending champion’s points in Madrid this week, and she has high hopes—or she should have high hopes, anyway—of winning her first major title next month in Paris. A betting site has installed the Romanian as the favorite, with a 13.9 percent chance, to win the French Open despite the fact that she’s ranked just eighth at the moment and hasn’t won a tournament this year. If nothing else, that should show us how wide open the WTA is right now, since Serena Williams ended her season.

Halep told Cahill she was fine, but the look on her face as he walked back to his seat said otherwise. She stared blankly as she tapped the heel of her hand against her racquet strings. It’s a look we’ve seen from her many times before in these situations, one that indicated she was struggling to make herself believe the encouraging words of her coach, and struggling to make herself believe that the worst wasn’t about to happen. Halep has said that she and Cahill have talked many times about how negative she gets on court, and how much it hurts her game. But fatalists are fatalists, and old habits die hard.

In this case, Halep had good reason to worry, because the worst quickly began to happen in the third set. Vinci started to play some of her best tennis since her win over Serena at the U.S. Open in 2015. She carved her backhand slices into one corner, then slapped forehand winners into the other. She put Halep on a string with her drop shots and showed off her old-school anticipatory senses at the net. At the same time, Halep started to do exactly what she and Cahill had tried so hard to get her to stop doing: She rushed from one (lost) point to the next.

Halep looked set to rush herself out of the match, but Vinci made a strategic error. Rather than trying to push her opponent off the court as quickly as possible, she let up with Halep serving at 2-5. On the last point of that game, she threw a half-hearted drop shot into the air and didn’t try to track down Halep’s re-drop. Down 3-5 and with nothing left to lose, Halep played her best game of the match. She hit a backhand-pass winner for 15-15, made a terrific leaping get and forehand pass for 15-40, and cracked a forehand winner to break. Vinci had given her mojo away, and she never got it back. In the deciding tiebreaker, the shots that had been landing in the corners for her were landing five feet out.

“She’s a good opponent, she’s a tough player,” Halep said of Vinci before her 6-3, 2-6, 7-6 (2) win. “I’m just thinking that I have to be aggressive again, to do my style, to do my job.”

But it wasn’t when Halep was being aggressive that she played her best in this match. It was when she mixed that aggression with patience. She finally found exactly the right blend at 3-1 in the tiebreaker. In that rally, Halep worked her backhand high and deep, with plenty of topspin, to Vinci’s backhand. This is the textbook way to break down a one-hander, and it left Vinci pinned behind the baseline and helpless.

“I have to be more aggressive” is what all players claim is the key to their games. Halep says it, too, and her shots are too good for her not to go for them. But on clay she also has the ability, when she’s patient, to grind her opponents down. When Halep hit safe, heavy topspin balls, instead of going for the lines, Vinci didn’t stand a chance.

Halep’s next match, against Samantha Stosur, is another tough one; she beat the Aussie easily in Madrid last year, but their career head to head is 4-4. After her win over Vinci, Halep should theoretically be feeling confident. Not only did she come back from 2-5 in the third, but she showed that she can go to a plan B when necessary. If she can keep that in mind when everything seems to be falling apart, she should be able to tell Cahill that everything is OK when he comes out to visit. Halep should also feel the same way the bettors do about her chances in Paris: They’re as good as anyone else’s right now.