Welcome back, Serena!

Great news again: Serena Williams is back! She’s playing in the Mubadala World Tennis Championship in Abu Dhabi against Jelena Ostapenko, the young sensation from Latvia and winner of the French Open, this Saturday 30^th December. I love watching both players but obviously am more familiar with Serena’s game having watched her since she started on the WTA tour. Jelena is a great opponent for Serena to have first up as she returns to the game because they don’t seem to have ever played each other on the WTA tour to date so making it impossible to predict how their games will match up. I wish them both a great, enjoyable match!

Jelena is a hard hitter with blistering forehands and backhands. For me, she was the best in the game in 2017 because her ground strokes are so effective. Why? I think she has outstanding technical ability to accelerate the racquet head through her ground strokes which generates such incredible power. I noticed the speedometer stats for groundstroke shots at the French Open showed Ostapenko was hitting harder than most of the top men! At the same time, she manages to keep her swing compact, efficient, controlled and therefore accurate. This is a deceptively difficult thing to do because it is all too easy to find yourself spraying the ball long and wide when attempting to create more attacking, hard hitting shots, as I have often managed! It takes a lot of concentration and body control not to accidentally become more inconsistent. Just one slight movement the wrong way and the shot is out! For instance, when trying to power through your cross-court shot, it is easy to imperceptibly overturn the upper body making the shot go wide. A minor twist of the wrist can distort the angle of your racquet and can either lift the ball (weakening and shortening your shot) or make your ball fly out. Or, mistiming your footwork with your speedier shots can rush you into misaligning your feet in relation to the opposite side of the court. For example, if your body is ever so slightly pointing towards the tramlines then that’s where your ball is going! The basic principle I try to remember is that the angle of your body is magnified several times over when it translates into the trajectory of your ball. Therefore, by having a very compact swing and perfecting the overall timing of her shots and footwork, Ostapenko avoids this problem so manages to effectively combine her power with the skill of executing great angles. A further advantage of a compact swing is that you can be faster and seem ever-ready for the ball at the baseline but can also more easily surprise an opponent by rushing to the net for a drive volley. All this makes her an excellent match player who can dominate the points with both her forehand and backhand whether in front or behind in a match. This is a very unusual mental and technical skill. I look forward to watching both players throughout the new season and will relish seeing how all the players on the tour jostle for position, both the top ten and those lower ranked.