Photo taken from ausopen.com
It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong in all that I am seeing: we are in January and even the girls who played in the U.S. Campaign (and we know many of them have waived that) should have had at least some break; though, at least one player in each match I watched was bandaged. Cocciaretto is having troubles with her left thigh; Wang had this tape they use now all over the leg and Hewitt seemed to be back from Afghanistan. Kostyuk was also bandaged, but probably that was only due to blisters. Wong, the girl who lost against Cocciaretto in the third round, was heavily bandaged at her arm. It has to be clarified that some girls are ending (and not starting) their season now – and they will take a break in February -; nevertheless, to see that within seven girls playing, all under 17 of age, four of them are accusing physical problems, means, in my view, that something, somewhere, is not working properly.
Anyhow, let’s speak about the match. I was interested in it because I saw both players before: Wang in Bonfiglio, and she didn’t impress me a lot; and Alexa Noel via streaming, as she played (and eventually won) the final of the Abierto Juvenil Mexicano against Osuigwe. I will focus more on Alexa because she is the player of the two who I was more interested in. You can find a full article on the unusual features of her playstyle here. So, I won’t repeat what I have already written, but just confirm that Alexa owns a really powerful serve, notwithstanding her being quite small, and that her forehand is very good. I concluded that article by wondering if the sliced backhand of the American, beside being nice to see, was enough of a shot to allow her to be competitive on the long term at higher levels: unfortunately, Wang proved my doubts to be grounded.
I am sure the Chinese has studied her opponent well as, from the second game on, she started to challenge Noel’s backhand, also by charging the net against it. Alexa had no defences: when Wang charged she was forced to play a sliced lob, which is a hell of a difficult shot; passing shots are forbidden to her since she is unable to hit the slice low enough and, the few times she tries to hit a topspin (twice she attempted to do so) results were just insufficient.
Alexa’s problems did not disappear when her opponent didn’t charge, as I will explain below.
The comparison between Alexa and Roberta Vinci (that I have already proposed) is quite easy to do, as both players rely exclusively on a sliced backhand. Roberta’s shot, though, is very low and her ball often doesn’t virtually bounce; the fact that she plays only slices may be a limitation, but the shot in itself is a great strength of her, as she can use it also as an offensive weapon, due to the low trajectories she manages to create with it and to her ability to find angles. Honestly, Alexa has shown nothing of that. By slicing, she often manages to find good depth, but the ball is too high and slow; as a consequence it results in a purely defensive shot. Throughout the match Wang had the time to comfortably play her crosscourt forehand against Alexa’s backhand (Wang is a lefty), trapping Alexa on the left side of the court and forcing her to be more and more defensive, until Wang hit a winner on the other side. Many times during the rallies, Alexa was restricted to hit very high balls with her backhand, just trying to keep depth and to recover a central position, hoping that the opponent would miss the next easy winner (but that only seldom happened). Throughout the match Wang attacked Alexa’s backhand and the American couldn’t find an appropriate countermeasure. Thus, there was never a real balance between the two players.
Only in the final stages of the second set there was a bit of a struggle, as Alexa came back from 3-5 to 5-5: though I am quite sure that this happened because Wang slightly injured herself when she hit a smash: the Chinese, suddenly and for no apparent reason, started to play weird tennis, trying to keep the rallies short: she served and volleyed a couple of times and results were not good at all and she tried winners that until then she has never attempted. On 4-5 Wang fell down on a break point, and I thought we had definitely lost her; instead, soon after, her game turned back to be as it was before and she won the two following games with absolute ease, securing the second set by 7-5 (she had won the first by 6-3). If Wang hadn’t had such a crazy couple of games, the final result would have been 6-3 6-3, also because Alexa was visibly demoralised.
My view is that Alexa needs to change something: I guess she can’t learn a topspin backhand at 16, so, I suppose, she needs to improve her sliced backhand a quite a bit, to compete at higher levels.
A few words on Wang. Again, I confirm the impressions I had in Milan. She owns a very good serve, a very good forehand and, if she has to counter a slow ball, a good backhand; though, being very tall, she lacks coordination and many times she can’t find a correct placement on her backhand when she is on the run. The Chinese’s backhand shakes also if she has to counter a powerful ball, as happened against Noel, in the few occasions in which the American managed to play her forehand against the Chinese’s backhand. I did not like her in Milan, I don’t like her now; plus, being so tall, she seems quite clumsy when she moves. Nevertheless, she is a top 20, so it seems that, overall, her tennis works fine!
