As some of you who will read this piece may have noticed, I basically freezed the blog due to various events, including the birth of my daughter, which indeed filled the little free time available; but honestly the stop was also due to boredom as, during the last year, I couldn’t find any young player who particularly interested me.
Great mistake of mine, as Leylah Fernandez is indeed a player worthy to follow and who has become a favourite of mine after I’ve seen her playing, even if only once.
I didn’t have the opportunity to follow Leylah during her junior career, and I didn’t even try hard to, as the numerous losses against Tauson during 2018 and 2019, all of them with very severe scores, made me assume that Leylah did not worth that much; I didn’t even pay a lot of attention to her really convincing win of the last French Open.
I saw Laylah, basically by chance, a few nights ago, in the final she played in Acapulco against Heather Watson and she made me regret of my superficiality, as I found her to be one of the best young players (or junior players, I could say, as she is still 17) I have ever seen. First of all, having seen her, I suppose I understood why Leylah continuously lost by Tauson during her junior career: Leylah owns a real small frame and probably the physical gap between the two was too much to be filled at the time.
I found her technique almost perfect. I was particularly impressed by the fact that Leylah hits especially her forehand with her arms fully stretched, while girls often tend to hit the shot with their arms flexed (this is why quite often girls hit backhands better than forehands).[1] See side pictures for some examples, and also Federer’s or Zverev’s impacts for further streched arms. Thanks to this feature, her motions are very elegant, she hits very consistently and she reduces at minimum the unforced errors.
The other feature that impressed me about Fernandez’s game was her ability to play volleys. Not that she displayed Edberg’s talent during the match, but finally I found a girl who is able to hit a high forehand volley by the book, instead than those awful full swing volleys that more and more are played today by junior girls, often leading to quite poor results (see the junior girls’ Australian Open final for quite an worrisome evidence of what I am talking about). The girl has anyway showed to own great feel, especially when executing drop shots, some of which were very impressive.
As she is quite little (and thin), Leyla’s serve is not a decisive shot, as one could imagine; though, the limits set by her height are partly compensated by a great legs’ work in her swing; as a result she manages, when serving, to at least avoid being attacked too easily, also because she can place the ball well and keep a high percentage of first serves in. Her small frame helps her, instead, to be fast and well-coordinated also in defensive situations. Her power may increase in the future since, looking at her small shoulders and very thin frame, I do not think that her coaches, due to her young age and rightly so, have worked too hard on her muscles.
From a mental side, Leylah was also tough, as demonstrated by the fact that she saved something like 10 championship points, not only in the second set, which she won at the tie break, but also in the third set, even if she was losing it by 1-5 and the match was virtually over.
It seems I found a strong player who is not an “ova”; Leylah was so good last evening that she made me decide to bring the blog back to life.
[1] I might pretend that this sophisticated analysis origins from me, but actually during last Bonfiglio i was advised about these technical features (and about Leylah technical awareness) by an Australian coach. I remembered what he told me about the Canadian and, during Leylah’s match against Watson, I was able indeed to verify that he was right.
