Tonight in Stanford, 5th seed Maria Sharapova defeated 3rd seed Agnieszka Radwanska 1-6, 6-2, 6-2. As always, Radwanska was like a gnat that Sharapova kept swatting, but that would not go away.
It always frustrates me to watch the Polish number 1 because she has a clever, top-level game--one of my very favorites to watch--that is neutralized by her almost total lack of a second serve. In tonight's match, Radwanska stayed steady and let Sharapova make a number of errors. But the 5th seed slowly found her groove, and--though it took her five match points--won the match after a two-hour fight. Sharapova hit 40 winners and made 40 unforced errors, which pretty much says it all.
In tomorrow's final, Sharapova will play Victoria Azarenka (whom she has suddenly begun emulating by screaming when she misses a shot), the tournament's 8th seed, who is playing with a wild card.
3 comments:
I thought I was the only one that was annoyed with Aga. You can tell that she has beefed up her serve. She was placing it well and not being afraid on the return. It is like she allowed her opponent to intimidate her with all the shouts etc and just regressed. It was pitiful to see.
As for the screaming after the point etc. don't you know that is to show how much of a fighter Sharapova is and how upset she is to be missing shots that she should be making. Funny how in that Wimbledon match with Serena when she was missing shots, all she did was turn aside and pick her strings.
We would believe the narrative if her coach did not stop shouting out instructions to her every chance he got. A lot of us last night got frustrated with the tennistv commentator and decided to flood their twitter page with requests for the commentator to not only be objective but to remember that there were Radwanska fans who were feeling slightly shafted by the one sided nature of the commentary
I still think about the time that Petrova beat Sharapova in straight sets and the commentators (Mary Joe Fernandez and Cliff Drysdale) mentioned Nadia's name one time during the match. It was "Maria's such a fighter," "Maria never gives up," etc. throughout the entire match. And then Petrova won, and the commentators just moved on to another subject.
I'm not reporting this in an anti-Sharapova way at all, as readers of this blog will know. Rather, it's just another example of how commentators can delude themselves.
Diane you would have no doubt hated the commentary last night when she played Radwanska. From the way the tennistv commentator was going on about Sharapova I half expected him to say "and Sharapova just hit the ball against the wall one more time" because you felt that Radwanska was nowhere to be seen. It needs to stop. It really does.
Post a Comment