Sorribes vs Konjuh: an imaginary match

[Veo que hay muchas visitas a este artículo en España: si alguien lee y quiere enviar un  comentario, por favor hágalo].

On second thoughts I realised I had to say a few more things on the 38^th City of Florence Junior Tournament, and that, at least, I didn’t give enough  space to the two winners. Before starting, I’d like to reveal the reason of my continued enthusiasm about the ITF junior Calendar and junior players, to whom I devote, in this Blog,  far more articles than to senior tournaments. Indeed, I get far less pleasure in watching on TV, say, the latest Nadal-Federer match: we all know what is going to happen, and after the first hour I get bored; on the contrary the ITF junior calendar offers each year new faces and hundreds of brand new players, and watching them live it’s a far more exacting experience. You can pick up, who knows, the champion of tomorrow. Secondly, I want to share my delight in having had so many visitors to this Blog over the week of the Florence tournament. I refrain from revealing the number of visitors I had last Saturday because I still can’t believe that they were so many.  I wonder why so many of them were Swiss (more than thirty on that Saturday!): Switzerland had after all no player in this tournament and I would like to receive from these friends a few words of comment and explanation if they can.

About Karen Khachanov. I apologize for having misspelled his name throughout, as Kachanov. And I forgot to say that he might remind one of Isner, but that that would be the wrong comparison. Khachanov is only a few centimers shorter than Isner, but the thing is that, at least now, his service is not, by far, so powerful and devastating as Isner’s. At the end of each match I’ve seen I counted very few aces from him. Let it suffice to say that in the final against Geens the two players vied in breaking one another, and none of them kept his service in the first four or five games. Yet Khachanov, imagining him at 21 or 22, will be more reliable and safer than Isner in prolonged rallies. Unlike Isner, he will develop as a solid red court player.

The main point of this article concerns Sara Sorribes. I want to start my observations on her real value as a Junior player by wishing her the same rapid ascent in the ITF ranking as Ana Konjuh’s last year. Konjuh won this tournament in 2012, and it was for her the first of many prestigious wins in ITF and Grand slam Junior tournaments. Florence was lucky enough to get Sorribes to play here, though it was risky to simply give her a wild card in the qualifying, as she would have deserved one in the main draw, where she should have been given no. 1 seed. Looking back, Fiona Ferro is the main loser of this tournament, as everyone expected she would win after last year’s final, while on the contrary she was lucky enough to get through the first rounds to the semifinal. She showed however to have made little progress from last year.

One must be honest to say, at the same time, that there are a few girls around who have the age to play in junior tournaments but don’t, and tournaments which they would win very easily, leaving only a few games to all the others (even probably none). Madison Keys and Yulia Putinseva, both born in 1995, just to name two, do not play these tournaments, and they are already competitive in WTA tournaments (Keys very competitive already!). Looking at the ITF junior rankings one reasonably argues that only the first five girls’ (Konjuh, Siniakova, Lottner, Bencic) is a reliable ranking, and that they form a quintet of really talented and very strong players having an evident superiority over all the others. Bartley and Bouchard, far behind, are obviously two others. Around the tenth position, and from that downwards, real values are much more debatable. No. 10 is for example, now, Elise Mertens, whom I saw last year at Prato where she played poorly and left everyone unimpressed.

Coming to Sorribes, I’ve tried to imagine a final with Konjuh this year in this Florence tournament.

Knowing them very well I think Konjuh would have won. The final score would have been 7/5 6/3 for Konjuh, I feel. Looking at the features of the two players, Sorribes’ service is inferior to Konjuh’s, which is more rapid and puts her in the condition of getting command of the rally and of gaining ground to play her winners. Sorribes, very mobile, would have had to return the ball but her spin would not have been so deep to prevent Konjuh from getting ever closer to the net. Sorribes is a better net player than Konjuh, but would have hesitated and feared to be passed by Konjuh. They belong to two different schools: Sorribes more patient and willing to play as many  rallies as possible; Konjuh more explosive and apt to close the point immediately.

They’ve never met before, the ITF archive says, and there is no head-to-head record. But I guess that sooner or later this will happen.

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