Maria Sharapova is no closer to solving the puzzle of Victoria Azarenka on hard courts after the Belarusian beat her in the China Open final to claim her fifth title of 2012. In fact, she’s seemingly getting further away, as the 6-3, 6-1 score was much closer to the straight-sets defeats Sharapova suffered in Melbourne and Indian Wells than their three-set tussle at the U.S. Open.
Sharapova’s sole victory over Azarenka this year came on clay in Stuttgart; Azarenka has now won their last six meetings on hard courts. Sharapova looked up against it from the beginning, leaking the first of 39 unforced errors for the match from the forehand side, double-faulting and sending a drive volley well long to be broken in the first game of the match. Azarenka raced to a 4-0 lead, handling Sharapova’s serve and groundstrokes with ease and forcing her opponent to go for outright winners because of her superior defense and ability to soak up and redirect pace. It’s the same conundrum that Sharapova has faced against the world No. 1, and the Russian showed no sign of having come up with anything to solve it. After saving two set points on her serve at 2-5, Sharapova did succeed in breaking back due to a poor game from Azarenka, but two subsequent double faults and another drive volley slammed long saw a break to conclude the first set.
The second set followed much the same pattern as the first, with Azarenka again breaking Sharapova immediately and racing to a 4-0 lead. Sharapova served at a respectable 62 percent but struggled to make much of an impact behind it, and her fans will have looked in vain for any signs of making a concerted tactical effort to change things up. Sharapova did stumble on to two patterns of play that worked well in baseline exchanges: Firstly, going back behind Azarenka, who is always prone to move too quickly back to the center of the court; secondly, using her brutally effective backhand to move Azarenka around, allowing her to dictate the rallies. Unfortunately, Sharapova failed to implement either tactic with any sort of consistency.
With Azarenka beautifully solid on the baseline and taking her opportunities to step inside for winners into the corners, Sharapova also failed to take advantage of her opponent’s weaker second serve. Going for broke on the return is all well and good, but when you’re consistently failing to land that shot in the court, as Sharapova was on key points, some sort of adaptive thinking on one’s feet might be required. It was beyond Sharapova today, who put up a last-ditch effort as Azarenka served for the match, stretching the game to almost eight minutes, but couldn’t convert either break point and put another second-serve return long to lose the game, set, match, and title. Azarenka is now the first woman to win two Premier Mandatories in the same season and scored a confident victory over the woman chasing her for the world No. 1 ranking.