Well, I don;t know. I guess that Heather would happily change her career path for that of Caro, without changing her playing style, if she could. But credit to her,as you say, for realising that she can't.
I agree that people have now figured out how to play Caro, (and maybe her mind's a bit elsewhere?) but I also think it shows ho inconsistent and poor some of the top players can be (and probably the top women in particular).
Kvitova played the most pitiful match at Madrid - Hantuchova (a wily player) gave her the complete run-around. Sam stosur can play toe-curling matches. Bartoli, Li Na, can all lose without looking like top-50 players, let alone top-20.
Obviously they don't so it that often (or they wouldn't be where they are), and some are less prone than others, but I think that supporters of Laura should realise that she will play poor matches, it doesn't mean that there's necessarily a problem or an issue, she'll play some good ones too and some brilliant ones. Hopefully tonight . . . .
Laura played really well for spells in that match, but in spells where she was less good it got away from her fairly quickly as you would expect against Serena - normally in her first match of a tournament Serena might be a bit rusty after a few weeks off but here she was fresh off of winning in Madrid and looked pretty impressive. The start of the second set definitely the most impressive spell and in the last couple of games she was a bit unlucky with her shots missing by fractions and Serena's landing on the line (this needed to be the other way round for the whole match for Laura to have a chance!)
The most impressive aspect of Laura's game was how well she competed in the long rallies and the least impressive was unsurprisingly the serve. She did end the match with more aces and more winners than Serena though and not many players will achieve that combination this year!
On a side note Heather will be back in action next week according to the BBC live text
-- Edited by tony_orient on Tuesday 14th of May 2013 08:44:26 PM
Some promising signs in amongst the usual problems. Laura needs an aggressive 2nd serve, the current version is neither fast enough nor remotely reliable. On a good day her 2nd serves are deep, she rarely surprises her opponent using width; it's all a bit too predictable and easy to attack. I really hope she chooses a coach who has the skill set to fine tune her serve so that it actually works; Krajan clearly failed in that respect.
I expected Laura to rise to the occasion but in truth we got a fairly typical display. She clearly has the weapons for this level but her movement looked painfully slow even though she tried hard to get to shots. For her to compete she really needs a first serve percentage mid 60s and to execute her shots; while she hit plenty of winners, she also lost rather too many points that she had control of; against a top opponent, she can't afford those mistakes.
At times Robson was a bit too passive. Spells when her first groundstroke behind her serve landed centrally, fairly short so immediately she'd lost control of the rally. Returns tended to be aggressive, some just missing, others setting up opportunities that she failed to put away, but on the whole I thought the return wasn't too bad. She still seems slow reacting to serves.
It does look like her unreliable serve is going to hold her back until it gets fixed. The rest of her game looks slightly improved on last year.
-- Edited by kundalini on Tuesday 14th of May 2013 09:03:56 PM
Well, whatever happens next, starting off a match with Serena Williams by breaking her serve can't be a bad thing (unless, I suppose, it makes her so angry that she goes straight into her "I am a champion and you aren't going to touch another ball for the rest of the match" mode).
Laura looks to be striking the ball really well early on - the difficulty is getting into a rally against Serena. The pace on Serena's 2nd serve returns was too much for Laura every time in her first service game.