Kostyuk…no more crazy

The final of the Australian Open was played last Friday night (Saturday morning in Australia): it was an exiting match, a real good one, which Marta Kostyuk managed to win against 1^st seed and 4^th junior in the world Rebeka Masarova, beating her 7-5 1-6 6-4.

I must say that in this match Marta proved me to be quite wrong on some judgements I wrote in previous articles on her: she is even better than what I thought. She is not only “boom-boom” and she is not “crazy”. Possibly she is just still young, but she demonstrated she can be brave, cool-blooded and able to play a match smartly. In my last article I wrote that if the “sensible” Marta would have shown up it could have been an interesting match. Though, I would never have expected to see such a version of Marta to show up.

Rebeka Masarova too must be cheered, because she played no secondary role in this final: she played more than sensibly, using her brain and the 6-1 in the second set was not due to Marta’s “crazy moments”, it was due to Rebeka’s intelligence. No surprise that last year Masarova beat in Gstaad two champions like Jankovic and Beck: the final was an enjoyable match also thanks to the good tennis Masarova showed.

Since there is so much to say on the match between the two, I will divide the article in two parts: this one will focus on the differences I noticed in Marta’s game between the finals and her previous matches; the second part will focus more on the final itself.

Starting from the beginning, it was curious that during the presentation of the 2 players I thought I wrongly stated that Marta was tall: seeing her beside Rebeka, it seemed that she was no more than 1.70. Nope. I was not wrong: Marta is 1.78 tall. But Rebeka is 1.87. All right.

I was also dubious that Marta would have been able to handle the pressure of a Grand Slam final, even more since the match was to be played against a very good player, much older than her and with professional experience. Let’s say it: attendance of this Australian Open was not top notch and the only challenging opponent Kostyuk found in her way to the finals was Jodie Burrage, who currently ranks 14 and ended last year in 15^th spot. As per Sato and Liang, if you put the two players one over the other, you would obtain a player still smaller than Kostyuk, and that says it all.

In handling the pressure she may have been aided by the crowd (unfortunately no more than 50 people), which was completely on her side. Be it as it may, my doubts proved to have been wrong, since during the whole match she did not have a single “crazy moment”, except maybe in the fourth game when, ahead by 2-1, she hit two really poor returns, one in the net and one out by 1.5 metres. Of course, during the match she made other mistakes and played poor shots, she held her monologues and she screamed; but there was a huge difference compared to the previous matches: mistakes were “good” this time, as I will better clarify in the second part of this article. I think that in her match against Masarova there was an idea behind her loose shots, they were not just super powerful balls destined to miss the court. Further, after her monologues, she immediately managed to focus back, usually winning the following point, instead of wasting the whole game with double faults or hopeless unforced errors.

How Marta managed to change her attitude so much in the course of this week I can’t explain: maybe the “crazy moments” in her previous matches were due to the fact that she knew that she was a “special observed” player, in light of the stunning results she had previously obtained, and she suffered too much pressure in the early matches of the tournament: in this sense, maybe the finals, to be played against a strong and experienced player, and which it would have been fair that she would have lost, were easier to play for her. But is it really possible that a 14 year old girl does not feel pressure in a Grand Slam finals, and that only due to such (supposed) lack of pressure she plays so sensibly? I don’t believe this; though, I can find no logic explanation to the different attitude I think Marta showed in the finals.

Another (partial) misjudgement I made in my previous articles on Kostyuk is about her net game: during this match she went to the net a lot, much more than in her previous games. I am quite convinced it was a fully conscious decision, which surprised me on its own: it showed, again, that she was in the process of thinking during the game; she was not just relying on the power of her shots, but trying to answer the challenges posed by Masarova by offering different solutions.

Stats show that she went to the net 34 times during the match and won 21 points; consider also that such stats do not take into account those many times in which she went to the net but did not have to play any volley, for instance due to the passing shot of her opponent being out. Comparing this figure with other Kostyuk’s matches, she went to the net 8 times against Rybakina (7/8), 10 times against Liang (5/10), more often against Burrage – 23 times (16/23). Such swift change from match to match cannot be casual: but again, I will come back to this in the second part of the article. But, beside this, I want to highlight that, yes, she may not be Navratilova, but she owns more skills than I originally thought. In particular I saw her playing, on 5-5 in the first set and 0-1 in the second, two real cute stop volleys which made me revaluate her abilities at the net. She also made some weak volleys, though: so, maybe her hand is not the most delicate, but she is not rough either and I think that working on her net play she can indeed obtain good results as volleyer (which I believe would be a great advantage to her).

Further, on her serve: I saw again Marta variating real much the speed, as in her previous matches, hitting one first serve at 120 and the following at 170. Again, there was a thought behind such tactic: it might have been wrong or wright, but it was evident that form time to time she was hitting slower serves as part of a tactic.

The only objection  to Marta is that her backhand slice is quite bad: her swing in executing the slice (which she seldom uses) is very horizontal and flat, and weirdly fast too: I wonder if some high slices which I qualified as terrible drop shots landing on the serve line and leaving myself full of unresolved questions, should have been actually, in Marta’s intentions, mishit long shots due to the fact that she impacted the ball with the racket’s face too open. Be it as it may; that’s the only remark I would make to Kostyuk game’s in the finals.

Overall, the aspect that impressed me more is that I have seen Marta thinking and trying to find solutions to impact on the course of the match; she tried to vary her strategy when things got hard: she did not just hit the ball as hard as she could to regain control. When I have the sensation that a young player is playing using her brain, that behind the shots, well or badly executed there was a thought, I am pleased; and Marta made me real pleased this time, even more because she managed to do that at 14 and in a Grand Slam final.

Recently Roberta Vinci having lost a match, showed all her frustration due to the fact that today’s tennis relies more and more on physical power and less on technique, stating: “the future we have in front of us is as such. This makes me f***ing angry and I lose my mind. My opinion is that these players do not think because they do not want to do so; they prefer to rely on a ‘make it or break it’ attitude… I think that this is the future we are facing: less and less tactics and more power, who hits the ball harder wins” [taken from Ubitennis.com, translated by myself].

Well, since Marta’s first match I’ve seen I realised she is powerful and able to hit the ball hard: but in the finals Marta showed she’s got more than that.

Tommy Hemp