Indian Wells 2018

I’m watching Indian Wells and enjoying the matches. There are so many amazing matches it’s hard to choose favourites or single any out.  It’s great to see Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka back. I was impressed by the Azarenka/Watson match which was hard fought with both hitting the ball very hard. Azarenka won but went on to lose to the US Open champion Sloane Stevens whose powerful shots and accuracy proved hard to push back against. Serena also had a hard 2nd round match against Bertens who is so fast it’s difficult to get a ball past her but Serena prevailed winning 7-6 7-5. She also beat Diyas, ranked 53 in the world, in the first round with incredible cross-court shots, great returns and improved movement. Serena is looking great. Kvitova had to battle past Putintsteva, ranked 81, in a tough 3 set match. Her powerful shots and great volleys won her the match but maybe tired her out for the next round where she lost to Anisimova but Kvitova has had an incredibly successful year so far on the tour so congratulations to her for that. Venus impressed me the most. She is faster and her shots have a whip like action to them beating Cirstea, ranked 35, 6-3 6-4. Unfortunately, the 2 Williams’ sisters met in the next round. Venus won. Sad to see Serena go out of the tournament but I love watching both of them so I’m pleased for Venus who beat her next two opponents to reach the semi-finals. I’d have loved Venus to win the tournament!

So what happened to the top players at Indian Wells, 2018?

In a way, the courts this year at Indian Wells favour a patient player who doesn’t mind longer rallies and bides their time in setting up the winner. This is a delicate balance between defensive and offensive play so you neither rush for the winner nor wait too long and end up playing defensively. Top players often favour offensive play, wanting to go for the winner early on but a court like this makes that approach harder to pull off. Although Halep has a stronger defensive, counterpunching style than many top players, this is sometimes exploited by her opponents in big matches deep into a tournament which may be reducing the number of titles she is otherwise capable of winning. Halep has a strong, offensive game too so is a good all-rounder, which may be helping her to be consistent enough to retain her number 1 ranking. But in terms of winning titles, she needs to not let her opponents push her into a pattern of running her around the court, creating long, tiring rallies which forces her into playing defensively. This could be reducing her stamina throughout tournaments and inhibiting her aggressive game plan, meaning she finds herself not clinching semi-finals and finals she expects to win which is frustrating for her.   

The courts are slower this year at Indian Wells so this does not favour Venus or Sharapova. It also means the ball bounces higher which requires adjustment because the ball takes time to come down. This means that the opponent has time to get into place before you hit your shot. 

Indian Wells illustrates that, like golf, the courses’ lie of the land change or, in tennis terms, the court varies between tournaments (and even between years at the same tournament). Tennis balls also vary in feel, depending on eg the make of the ball, the weather, the spin which affects the heaviness of it on your racquet and flight of the ball. The same surface type varies, so hard courts, grass courts, clay courts vary within themselves significantly according to many factors. I certainly found this to be the case. For instance, on clay, the court felt different depending on how much the ground staff watered the court before the match and, unlike at WTA events and Roland Garros, it wasn’t watered during the match so became progressively drier throughout the match. This affects the ball and how it bounces and what effect your spins will have. A wetter court means spins such as slice, sidespin, backspin stay low and have a greater twist, making it a more successful and aggressive shot. The drier the court, the higher the ball bounces so these shots will lose their effectiveness and topspins and kick spins will bounce higher so are more effective. So tactically, you are playing the court as much as the opponent because exploiting their weaknesses is related to the effects you can produce under the playing conditions. It also varies whether it’s outside or inside. Outdoors, the weather and altitude affects playing conditions and needs to be factored in, both to reduce your own unforced errors as well as tactically. Most players dislike windy conditions, Martina Hingis being a famous exception who loved such conditions, making many less unforced errors than her opponents. It rained before my first match on grass so postponing it. So now pre-match preparation needed adjusting because the start time was more unpredictable. The playing conditions were different so I took this into account. A wetter grass court meant I used slice more which was very effective in reducing my opponent’s ability to play her hard hitting power play which was quickened by the fresh damp grass. She used the drop shot to great effect because it died on the damper turf so gave me less time than usual to run it down and hit a winner. The time of day you play impacts on patterns of match play, for instance, whether you have to deal with artificial lights or not or if the sun gets in your eyes when serving on a particular side (side of the net and if deuce or ad side). So a wide range of conditions favour different players and different tactics on any given day. Nadal is supreme on clay courts, especially at Roland Garros, but Federer reigns on grass courts, especially at Wimbledon, for instance.

In the semi-finals, both Venus and Halep played extremely well and were fast onto the ball but, I noticed that Venus had to deal with balls that veered slightly away from her after they landed so complicating the footwork needed to return them and sometimes causing her to jerk her body to adjust at the last minute. So does that mean that Kasatkina puts side spins and kickers on her ball making the ball heavy, high and awkward? Venus would then have to run around the ball to adjust her return, making Kasatkina a more tiring, demanding opponent both physically and psychologically. Much more concentration and focus is needed to deal with the constant adjustments needed to stay aggressive and prevent unforced errors creeping in against Kasatkina. This becomes even more demanding given that part of Kasatkina’s tactic is to stay 100% focused herself at all times and rid herself of any thoughts at all to ensure her concentration is not broken by random thoughts or negative ones. This is an unusual sports psychology approach because often the emphasis is on positive thinking. However, in her post-match interviews, Kasatkina makes the observation that as soon as you think at all, bar about service placement, you start to make errors because it is almost impossible to keep all thoughts constructive. I like that! I think it might access a different level of consciousness and mental focus. Perhaps it helps for playing instinctively which speeds up your reaction time and maybe releases brain-space so that you put the skills and knowledge stored in your memory bank from practice sessions into the match. A bit like a computer which is faster when it deletes unnecessary items so has more gigabytes available to perform current tasks. I’ll experiment with emptying my mind of thoughts later when practising because I definitely think too much on court and in matches it gets in the way and makes you think you are playing worse than you are. Osaka had this problem of judging her playing standard as worse than it was against Halep, despite having just won the first set! It took her coach to set her straight when she called him on court and change her negative thought pattern to a positive one.      

Osaka and Kasatkina have the effect of making the opponent unable to get into their usual rhythm although, having said that, Kasatkina only beat Venus by a whisker. I loved the way Venus played in the SF’s. She was fast, had great footwork, excellent overheads and beautifully angled volleys which is why she so nearly won. Maybe the only difference between them was that Kasatkina uses her legs more. That is to say, she powers through her legs into the shot giving her explosive power efficiently whereas Venus mostly uses her upper body which is more tiring. This is noticeable by the way Kasatkina does a Monfils by leaping onto the ball rather than staying more firmly rooted to the court. And certainly when they employed the Ostapenko ‘whip through’ they usually won the point either on that shot or as a result of the opportunities it created to win a follow up shot. Osaka employs this whip on her forehand and even tries it on her backhand, including when she is off-balance which is very hard to do. She has a shorter take-back on her backswing which gives the opponent less time to react to her shots because they can’t be sure where the ball will go. Halep’s takeback is longer and begins well before the ball arrives which reduces pace and might make her shots easier to read. Except when Halep ‘hooks’ the ball on her racquet, giving her lots of disguise, often producing many of her winners. Osaka also appears to have a heavy ball which means her opponent is having to work harder off the shot. During the on-court coaching, we learnt that Osaka’s tactic was to try to prevent her opponent from hitting wide angles by hitting hard and deep. I know how awful those are! You get pushed back behind the baseline (a defensive position) which opens up the court for the opponent to run you ragged and hit a winner. This is made all the easier because it’s tougher to hit a hard, deep shot yourself from that position so you are more likely to give them a weaker, shorter ball to put away. We can also see this style of play by Osaka in the final with her winning drive volley which she took out of the air and hit deep into the court. This shot clinched the tournament for her! In this tournament, Osaka loved to keep playing to one side (usually the backhand) until she is well placed to do a short acute angled winner on the other side. This is also a classic tactic which I came across on the ITF and its effect is that is increases your unforced error count on the side they don’t play to as much, giving them winners on that side. In the final against Kasatkina, Osaka continued this tactic of producing errors from her opponent and won the tournament. Although Kasatkina also makes her opponents struggle to get into a rhythm and produce errors, Osaka dealt with this very well in the final against her. She varied her spins and shots even more than in earlier rounds which somewhat played Kasatkina at her own game while retaining more offensive play herself. Osaka made great use of the inside-out backhand which is a lesser-spotted shot, especially when used as a tactic. Within the first few games, Osaka also became aware that she needed to leave wider margins when trying to hit winners against Kasatkina which meant she was less error prone than her opponent expected. This put Kasatkina under more pressure than previously in the tournament. Osaka kept up the pressure and made the match run away from Kasatkina before she could implement plan B fast enough to revive. I know how that feels! People looking at matches often assume that the player trailing in the match can surely just wake up and make an immediate come-back but it’s actually more complex a task than it seems.

Osaka won Indian Wells! So congratulations to Osaka who is also the first Japanese (Haitian) player to win Indian Wells! It’s her first WTA title which parallels Ostapenko’s first title, the French Open at Roland Garros last summer! Both Osaka and Ostapenko show that experience is not everything or even that important. And it need not be achieved incrementally. They both jumped from no WTA titles (most of which are only 1 week long tournaments) to winning a major, top tier title (one a premier tier compulsory event and one a Grand Slam) that require roughly 2 weeks of stamina. One would assume this takes more experience to cope with and plan than a smaller, lower tier WTA 1 week tournament, but clearly not! Kasatkina didn’t even have her fitness coach present. Their success at Indian Wells and the French Open is truly inspirational for WTA players of all rankings, junior tennis players and children watching who are aspiring to be professional tennis players.