We should have known Svetlana Kuznetsova was feeling confident. In her press conference two days ago, the two-time Slam champ was asked, “Being seeded No. 23, is it a weight you carry around?”
“I don’t know,” Kuznetsova said. “The first thing it makes me think of is Michael Jordan’s number.”
Kuznetsova had a right to feel confident. Call her Exhibit A for the case for a longer off-season. She, along with half a dozen other top WTA players, pulled the plug on her 2010 not long after the U.S. Open. Now she’s come to Melbourne looking fitter than she has in years, if not ever. "People say to me, '[Did you] lose some weight?'" Kuznetsova said today. "I don't know, it looks like it to me. It's a little bit easier, less trunk to carry." If anything will make you more confident, that's probably it.
The 25-year-old Russian, who won the French Open in 2009, hit a lull in 2010 that started to look like the beginning of the end after a decade on tour. But it feels like a new season for her in many ways. “[Last year] I couldn’t play really how I wanted,” she said. “But I’m changing it now. I’ve been working hard for the pre-season.” She said she went away from what she does best in 2010, and that she was still trying to get back to where she thinks she can be, physically and tactically. “No matter what,” she said, “I always think I can do better.” Kuznetsova channeling the Puritan work ethic: I like it.
Her outlook from match to match is always hard to gauge, but this week the eagerness has been easy to see in her press conferences. Asked before the match about her 2-16 record against Henin going in, Kuznetsova said, “I know she won most of the time, but believe me, I don’t count. I know that each match is a different match. It’s a new match to play. The same amount of points to win again.” Kuznetsova channeling the spirit of Jimmy Connors: Like it, too.
Despite her record, she can play with Justine. She doesn’t have the same feel or flair or tennis DNA, but she has the other side, the athletic side, covered. Today she came out hitting a heavier ball than Henin and controlling rallies. She was quick to pounce on short balls, and she stayed down and hit through her shots even when she had to run a long way to get them.
But whatever happened in the first set, it was always going to be the second that would be make or break. How would she hold up? “It’s tennis, it’s nerves,” Kuznetsova said after the match. In other words, she knew she was going to choke at some point, because that’s what happens.
For Kuznetsova, who is well-versed in tennis disaster, it had all gone a little too smoothly. “It was too perfect,” she said with a laugh, “6-4, 5-4, hadn’t been broken. Then I got tight.”
From afar, the second set might have appeared to be a choke fest—Kuznetsova herself called it “a little comedy, some women’s drama out there.” When she served for the match at 5-4, Kuznetsova double-faulted and hit a routine backhand long to be broken. In the tiebreaker, four of the first five points were decided by unforced errors. But even when Kuznetsova is playing well, this is the type of tennis she creates. Hitting in or hitting out, she doesn’t give her opponent much rhythm, and Henin knew she had to go for her shots when she got a look at them—that’s her style, too.
The tension in Laver Arena gave the match the atmosphere of a semifinal rather than a third-rounder. By the middle of the tiebreaker, when both players had shaken off the early-point nerves, it felt like a knife fight. Winner was followed by error, but each player took her chance to strike. “It was like a lottery,” Kuznetsova said with a sigh of relief. “We had some crazy points.”
Big chances, and sometimes dumb chances, were taken. Down 4-6 in tiebreaker, double match point, Henin took a Kuznetsova first serve and went for broke down the line. If there was ever a time to play it a little safe and make her opponent hit a few balls, this was it. But Henin hit the the ball on the line. Kuznetsova was as stunned as anyone else. “That’s pretty risky, isn’t it?” she asked the assembled press.
After some prodding, Henin admitted that she “wasn’t 100 percent.” She wore a brace on her forearm for the match, and she had spent the week warming up with foam balls in practice, which were easier on her injured elbow. When she was asked if she would have skipped this event if it had not been a major, she started to say, “probably,” but stopped herself.
“I know I’m not 100 percent,” she said. “I knew it before walking on the court. That’s why I say there are no excuses. I decided to play not being 100 percent. It’s been difficult in the last three days on my elbow.”
Henin’s comeback has been one long frustration, and you could see it in her eyes and in the thin, resigned smile she carried through her presser today. The seven-time Slam winner has never gotten on track. Watching her miss makable backhands over and over reminded me of my theme for the day: tennis’ accelerated aging process. So many elements, starting with health, have to fall in line for a player to get to where Henin did in the first place. Getting it to happen twice, at 27 and 28, was never going to be easy.
Kuznetsova now plays her friend Francesca Schiavone, in what should be a feisty shootout. If she wins that, she might get Wozniacki. It’s an opportunity.
I liked Kuznetsova’s game and attitude today. Down set point in the tiebreaker against her lifelong nemesis, she played her most determined point of the match, ending a long back and forth rally with an emphatic crosscourt backhand. For once, she had taken her level above Justine’s.
When she was asked if she got tight in the tiebreaker, Kuznetsova smiled and confessed, “Yeah, I did.”
“But I was not scared,” she added quickly. “I was not afraid when I went to the court.”
New year, no fear? We’ll see very soon.