Week 7 - ITF ($25K) - Perth(2), Australia (Hard)

vohor · Grand Slam Champion

RE: Week 7 - ITF ($25K) - Perth(2), Australia (Hard)

AliBlahBlah · All-time great

Looks like an Arina Rodionova scoreline to me.
It's not exactly without precedent for Arina's antics to unnerve or deliberately distract opponents.
Heck, even the queen of 'feistiness' Putintseva herself, was nonplussed by her!
If Freya had to deal with the full performance, then random scorelines are very understandable.
The sideshow only tends to work the once, at best, against most players though, so Freya will have her number next time

vohor · Grand Slam Champion

She doubtless received lessons from her role-model-from-hell elder sister in the antics stakes; on another forum the Rodionovas always had "(Boo)" as a preferred forename in recognition. A win against one always felt sweet...as ABB says, next time Freya :)

christ · Futures level

wimdledont wrote:
... She won only 1 point on second serve in the second two sets; compared to winning 60+% of second serve points in FQR...

These can't really be compared: I win several second serves playing club tennis, but would like win 0% against Andy Murray. The quality of the opponent makes a massive difference to the chance of winning a second serve so the stats that you highlight seem to be exactly what one would expect. A better opponent is much more likely to take advantage of a weaker shot.

indiana · Tennis legend

In women's tennis generally, I used to look at stats and think a lot of the serves must be awful.

Then I have watched a lot more over the years and realised it's not being awful ( apart from very occasional few ) but just not particularly powerful, and even less so on second serve. With players generally being good off the ground then very often the opening really attacking shot is the service return then giving the returnee the initative. And of course, the better the returnee the even worse the servuce stats look. The power thing will clearly always make serve breaks frequent in women's tennis compared to men's, and slight momentum changes in often close games have exagerrated games scoreline effect.

Re any possible injury effecting serve, I'd go further than CD in that usually it is the first serve that would suffer, that's the one that you would really be taking something off, not putting everything into, whereas in a second serve you naturally hold back anyway, not putting the full body into but looking for accuracy. I'm not aware of anything particularly unusual in Freya's second serve action that counteracts that. So, I just don't see injury related concern in these stats.

-- Edited by indiana on Thursday 18th of February 2016 11:59:37 AM

paulisi · Tennis legend

I assume no-one watched the stream then? rather than speculating....

Deano13 · Social player

I saw a bit of the second set and first 3 games of the final set! Freya played really well second set, solid groundstrokes and was in control of most of the rallies she just started to make too many errors at the start of the 3rd and it seemed to get away from her!

wimdledont · Challenger level

I didn't realise there was a stream; so just speculation/reading what I can into the ITF livescore stats.

There are other possible interpretations; but it's now 6 sets since she last served an ace, so I think there's a question mark over her first serve too...

With one of our leading ITF ladies (broady) having one of the best serves, and another, (moore) one of the weakest, I'm in the habit of watching out for those stats; and I generally expect to see Freya up at the Broady end of that spectrum.

brendan · Strong Club Player

interesting that 3 of the 4 semi-finalists were qualifyers - seems that Freya's at the right level here

-- Edited by brendan on Friday 19th of February 2016 10:03:00 PM

indiana · Tennis legend

Arina Rodionova went on to win the title.

Actually 'just' two semi finalists were qualifiers, both beaten at that stage. Both finalists though were non seeds.

-- Edited by indiana on Sunday 21st of February 2016 09:06:23 PM