BEIJING—On day six of the tournament (Thursday Oct 2), the sun was shining and I was on my way to the tennis courts when I saw Venus Williams stepping out of a car and going back into the hotel. I was surprised to see her back in the hotel since she was supposed to be the first match on, playing Petra Kvitova.
I asked her what happened and she said, that she wasn’t feeling well and had to default her match. Later in the official statement, she said how she had an amazing time in China and was really disappointed to not be able to walk on court today for her match against Kvitova, but she caught the same virus her sister Serena had in Wuhan. Serena defaulted her match in the first set at the tournament in Wuhan. The Williams sisters have had a year of up and down moments on and off the court, struggling with virus infections a few times already this year. After her default in Wuhan, Serena seems to have bounced back well and won her late night match against Lucie Safarova with a 6-1, 1-6, 6-2 win to reach the quarters.
The matches were back on the outside courts today. Andrea Petkovic from Germany had the match in her hands against Simona Halep, the 2014 French Open Finalist but the 27-year-old German, wasn’t able to take the match home. She was leading early in the first set, leading in the second set, yet every time when it came down to it, she froze and lost the important points.
There wasn’t much anyone did right or wrong with a score of 6-7, 7-5, 7-6 going in Halep favour but when it came down to it, in the crucial moments of both of the tiebreaks, Petkovic seemed to play more nervous than the World No.2 player who used her chances well. With two and a half hours played and a tough win, Halep enters the quarterfinals of the China Open where she will face Ana Ivanovic from Serbia.
Ivanovic and Sabine Lisicki is a duo that has already played each other three times this year. Ivanovic has improved that statistic now and is leading 3-1 in wins over Lisicki. Both players came to Beijing with a tournament win to their name. Lisicki won the Hong Kong Open and Ivanovic won Tokyo prior to playing in Beijing. It was Ivanovic who played a bit better today, serving better, bouncing up and down, moving well and making fewer mistakes then the German. She took the match with 6-3, 7-5.
Rafael Nadal moved on to the quarterfinals with a win over Peter Gojowczyk of Germany. He took the match 6-3, 6-4. Both players played long points and even longer games in which Nadal won the deciding points. At the press conference after the match, he talked about how he feels good but is still working on his rhythm and feeling the ball. He talked about ’the ball‘ quite a lot in his press conference, criticising the quality of the balls and saying how, not only him, but also other players have been complaining about the ’bad' balls the tournament is using at the China Open. He said that the HEAD PRO balls, being used, bounces quite strangely and poorly and that he’s been talking to the ATP tour about using the same balls for all the tournaments the whole year round, but so far nothing has been changed.
In professional tennis, on tour there are different brands of balls and it even depends where the ball has been made as to the quality and how high it jumps, or to what pressure it has been made. There is a different from tournament to tournament and players usually don’t have enough time to adjust to a certain ball, so they talk about ’the need to feel the ball'. Nadal seemed quite keen to bring that fact across and hopes that one day the tour will implement the rule to play with one brand of balls all year round.
The Wild Card, Andy Murray is on a roll since winning the Shenzhen Open last week. The Scots man was able to adjust quickly to a completely different game, climate and environment coming from the south of China’s 33 degree Celsius hot, humid weather to the 11 degree Celsius, cold rainy north. He is in the quarterfinals after having an easy win against Pablo Cuevas from Uruguay with a 6-2, 6-2 final result. He will be facing Marin Cilic in the quarterfinals.
In the middle of all the singles matches that were being played today there was a whole world of matches that many forgot to talk about at the National Centre. Out of the 26 matches, 13 were exciting doubles matches. On the lower courts, the players were playing a whole different game to the individual sport of single tennis, doubles was on.
I have spent the entire week with a group of lovely female tennis professional players, who were not only focused on singles but also on doubles. In a tennis world where all the attention is given mainly to the top singles players such as Sharapova, Williams, Djokovic and Nadal; doubles, a ’team game', can unfortunately go unnoticed.
So I left my dark, underground media room and walked outside in the sunshine and into the crowd to find men and women grinding, stretching for every ball and fighting in good spirits to enter the next round of China Open. How unfamiliar doubles play can be to some people was very clear to me. I had a young woman approach and ask, if the players were just practicing or if it was a match and what kind of match was it? The scoreboard clearly showed 6-2 and 2-0 Kops-Jones - Spears. So, why can doubles go unnoticed?
One of the reasons I was given, is that there are too many singles matches and singles players who are treated like movie stars and therefore little attention goes to doubles as many top players seem not to take doubles serious and use it mainly to practice; and that the WTA and ATP tour doesn’t do enough to promote the doubles game that everyone who plays social tennis knows.
As I was watching the top players that qualified for Singapore, Raquel Kops-Jones and her partner Abigail Spears, I couldn’t help but remember US College tennis. Everyone that played any kind of College Division-1 sport in the US can relate to there being no better atmosphere then playing ‘ball sport’, any kind of ball sport in college, where the crowd watching goes crazy and everything centres around team work.
Doubles is a game of teamwork, communication, aggressive net play, tactics, supporting each other and is a whole different game to singles. There are many former college players that have gone on to play professional tennis and are among the World’s most successful, just like Spears and Kops-Jones. Just a few years back, they were successful college athletes. Kops-Jones was playing for UC Berkeley and Spears was doing a year at UCLA before turning professional. They lost today in the quarterfinals against Mladenovic and Pavlyuchenkova in the super tiebreaker (played instead of the third set and played up to 10 points), but nevertheless we will be seeing and following the ladies doubles as the top players move to Singapore for the WTA World Championships.
Other Results
In the women’s singles: Kuznetsova - Kerber 2-6, 6-4, 6-3; Vinci – Makarova 6-1, 0-6, 7-5; Stosur – Cornet 6-4, 6-2: Serena Williams – Safarova 6-1, 1-6, 6-2.
In the women’s doubles: Mladenovic, Pavlyuchenkova – Hingis, Penetta 6-3, 3-6, 10-6; Rodinova, Kudryavtseva – Barthell, Minella 6-4, 6-7, 10-7; Vinci, Errani – Zhang, Han 6-2, 6- 3; Peng, Hlavackova – Gajdosova, Tomljanovic 6-4, 7-5.
In the men’s singles: Berdych – Troicki 6-3, 6-4; Klizan – Gulbis 6-2, 3-0 (w.o); Cilic – Sousa 6-3, 6-3.
In the nem’s doubles: Rojer, Tecau – Berdych, Isner 7-6, 4-6, 10-7; Brunstrom, Monroe – Cabal, Farah 6- 7, 6-3, 10- 7.
Vlatka Jovanovi? is an ex-professional WTA ranked tennis player and an independent broadcaster journalist.
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