Kim Clijsters earned her 500th professional victory today, though when she's going through her favorite matches with Jada's children 30 years from now, I doubt that this one will be near the top of her list.
Clijsters broke her opponent straight out of the gate, and her deeper and more accurate groundstrokes put her in control of the first set. Martinez Sanchez actually hits with more pace than Clijsters off the ground, but if you look at a Hawk-Eye graphic of her shot placement, you'll see that a lot of her shots only just cross the service line, while Clijsters finds the corners much more consistently. Serving for the set at 5-3, Clijsters faltered, but after breaking at love, Martinez Sanchez was promptly broken at love herself.
As the second set progressed, Clijsters' baseline game began to waver, and two double-faults in her second service game were converted into a break. Clijsters would later break back, but at 4-5, 30-40 her opponent's scrambling defense was rewarded with a forehand error, evening the match at a set apiece.
Martinez Sanchez plays a tactically varied game, but a strategically rigid one: she serves and volleys on each first serve, and stays at the baseline for each second serve. This baffled me, since her second serves had good bounce and were only 10 mph slower, on average, than her first. I'd have thought Martinez Sanchez would get even greater returns from the ploy by staying back on a few of her first serves, and coming in behind some of the second balls. One tactic that might occur to Martinez Sanchez's opponents is to hit high chip returns off her first serves: the Spaniard volleys quite well, but made a complete dog's breakfast of any ball above head height.
Clijsters began the third set as she'd started the first, racing to a 3-0 advantage. Again, she was pegged back to 3-2, but again Martinez Sanchez handed back the break, with two missed backhand volleys and a four-foot long second serve. Clijsters finished the match with a crunching forehand winner, but winners were a comparative rarity this afternoon—combined, the two women hit 52 winners, against 84 unforced errors and 17 double-faults.
It was the kind of match that leaves the loser frustrated not to have taken her opportunities, and the winner relieved to have prevailed playing below her best form. You don't get 500 wins in any sport without knowing how to do that.
—Andrew Burton