Dinara’s Rollercoaster Slides To a Halt As Ana Wins the French
The third time was the charm today for Ana Ivanovic to win her first Grand Slam over Dinara Safina by a score of 6-4, 6-3.
Ah Paris, is there any prettier place to be cold, said Mary Carillo with a laugh. The weather at today’s French Open women’s final left something to be desired, but at least the women put on a decent show for the crowd, even if they couldn’t get a third set out of the effort. The way the second week of this tournament has gone, we weren’t sure what to expect. The men’s side has given us only the promise of some interesting match-ups, but when the burgers arrived they seemed to be missing a little beef here and there. So God only knows what was expected from the women, but we were holding our breath, given that the last six women’s finals have all been two-setters. And not very competitive ones at that. Today at least it looked like both women showed up to play, and we didn’t get a blow-out.
For Dinara Safina we suppose now she will come back to earth a little, and step off that roller coaster ride that’s been going on now ever since she won Berlin a month ago over Elena Dementieva. The good news is that Safina is now a major player in the women’s game, and likely to stay that way. She’s been fire-tested for sure now and she’s over the hump in her career of being not only the Other Safin, but the Other Safin Who’s a Head Case Too. She has climbed over an impressive array of female bodies to get here and in very impressive fashion, taking out Maria Sharapova early in three sets and down several match points, then enduring more of the same in a tight three-setter against Elena Dementieva. The most difficult match for her now loomed as Svetlana Kuznetsova in the semi-finals, but that oddly enough turned out to be a rather mild two-setter. Mild that is in terms of what Safina has been used to, namely dug-in fingernails and being down lots of break points, set points and match points against her.
Whatever else we can say about Safina, we can certainly say her nerves held up pretty good today, as did the variety of play she’s used throughout the two weeks. She ran into a player today who played a bit better and is more experienced in the big moments. Flatness and pace of shots trumped spin and depth on this day.
“I was a little bit tired,” Dinara confessed almost a little reluctantly, I thought. No, really? Gee, imagine that. “Too many tough matches.” Next time she hopes to be fresher. Ana Ivanovic was a heavy favorite to win her first Slam and she showed she was ready. Both these women have worked very hard to get here, and their issues have been similar. Both have worked hard on their fitness and mobility and on keeping their emotions under control.
We saw the match’s shape in the first few games: Ana getting off the mark early, with solid aggressive play, going for angles and lines and serving well. Dinara mostly hung with her. The keys were probably a few errors that crept into Dinara’s play in the few break games that settled the hash. Ivanovic can also play much better defense at this point; she’s not so gung-ho to hammer the first ball that comes her way. She can trust in her game enough now to wait for her moments and recognize them and seize them as they come.
In the first set Ana got an early break, then another to go up 4-1. Safina took them both back, but gave up another at 4-5. Ana served it out then for 6-4. Both women served rather well, and yet there were still five breaks in nine games in this set alone. It was pretty apparent early that nerves were not going to be a factor.
What was going to be a factor was whether Dinara could get enough variety going to put doubt in Ana’s head. She tried: she served well, particularly out wide; she pulled off a couple of excellent drop shots, and she threw in those loopy high balls and change-ups that her served her very well in this event. But Ana replied with enough power to work her way through that.
The second set saw Ana with another early break for 2-1. You sensed that Ana would again move out early, leaving Dinara to try and stay with her. The stats were quite close at this point, 17 winners to 19 errors for Dinara, 20/19 for Ana.
Dinara had her chances to break back at 3-2 but Ana fought her off and held to go up 4-2. Game 7 was the longest of this set, with Dinara fighting through seven deuces before finally holding serve with her favorite combo shot, the big serve out wide followed by a two hander up the line. On top of all this, someone’s baby starts yelling right in the middle of everything. The parents can afford Roland Garros tickets but can’t line up a babysitter? Quel horreur! I wouldn’t think the French would stand for such things, but they did. Dinara frowned and stepped away from her serve as the offending child was hustled off to wherever they haul offending children in France. Probably tennis boot camp, where they will be coddled and fawned over as the next child prodigies and then their careers will go straight into the can.
Dinara held for 3-4, but Ana still continued to protect her own serve well; Dinara couldn’t make much of a dent and Ana held easily for 5-3. Ivanovic broke in the next game, using big forehands to go up 0-30 on Dinara’s serve, and a moment later delivered the winning shot up the line to earn her first French title.
It was very odd to see Justine Henin sitting there in the crowd, looking a bit forlorn and remote and with yet another cold sore on her lower lip. Surely there are vitamins she can take? God only knows what she was thinking sitting there watching two women play in an event that she has owned. But I guess someone has to present the trophies and they settled on Henin. It still feels disturbing that she just up and left the game and yet here she is.
Congrats to both women, and especially to Ana Ivanovic, who is now the new Number One player in the world and of course the first Serbian woman ever to win a Grand Slam. She delivered the goods. This is all good for us because we now have another rivalry in the women’s game and hopefully it can keep us warm and happy should another cold day in Paris roll around.
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4 Responses to “Dinara’s Rollercoaster Slides To a Halt As Ana Wins the French”
June 7th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Great piece. I love the but about tennis camp. Why was Justine here yet she sent a video acceptance to an awards ceremony earlier in the week? What was that all about?
It feels like it’s a whole new tour without Justine, as though something has been lifted and people aren’t nervous anymore and some of them - Dinara for instance - feel reborn. It’s like the cat’s away and now everyone can come out an play.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:08 am
It does feel like a whole new tour without Justine, and I find it interesting she made a video acceptance of something else earlier in the week but showed up at RG. You’d think given the utter finality with which she announced her big news that the last place she’d want to be - and just as a spectator at that - is sitting at a tennis tournament! I just didn’t want to see her sitting there, something terribly wrong about that picture and yet I suppose she has good excuses to be there, she still has her tennis schools and what not or so the commentators were arguing on her behalf. Keep talking guys and girls, maybe you’ll convince us of….SOMETHING. I felt she belonged somewhere else. Where I do not know, but not here.
Do you suppose the men felt that way for a while about Federer? He seems to have lifted the play of everybody else, maybe you think Justine had a slightly opposite effect on the women? Of maybe shutting them down a bit? And yet as we see, a player like Safina can still come out and dust off Henin like she did in Berlin. But Safina was ready, whether it was Henin or another Number One, she would have made her move anyway. Overall I am wondering if Justine was so good that the women felt they had less chance against her than the men did against Roger.
Having said that about Mr. Federer, I am just starting my tape of the men’s final, and it DOES NOT LOOK GOOD for my man!! Two breaks down already in the first set? I turned it off and now I’m going for a bike ride :0)
June 10th, 2008 at 3:10 am
I dont’ agree with you two. I didn’t find the tennis better without Justine in the draw. Dinara and Ana play the same style of tennis - both very much like Lindsay Davenport.
I also do not feel that the Belgian is a witch of some sort and has now freed the real beautiful tennis players that you seem to prefer to play wonderful tennis.
I will not read this blog anymore. Henin was a Federer type player and a rarity because she is female. Her style isn’t the norm on the WTA and should be applauded rather and jeered at by so called writers like yourselves.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Well then Bryan, you must have loved the final from a year ago, when Justine just blew Ana out of the water. Good competitive stuff, eh? If that is your idea of “better” women’s tennis, I’ll take a pass, ok? :0) Since you mention Lindsay Davenport, I’ll say here here to that, since I happen to like her style of play, which combines good elements of forward movement with baseline shotmaking. I think Dinara and Ana will have a good rivalry just based on the fact they are nearly the same size, so that will be a good match up, and they are also very aware that their games need to keep developing more variety and they’re already adding it. As much as I did like watching Justine play - and I did like watching the woman play - I was also aware she was having a Federer-like effect on the field. That doesn’t make her a witch, just a very good player whose very good playing doesn’t allow for people to work their way into the tennis mix very easily. Now they are freer to do that. I think they were starting to do that anyway though, which may have been one of the factors pressuring Henin away from the game. She did raise the level of the field, just as Federer has, and in the end they know they will run the risk that it comes back to bite them in the tush. As long as you are getting annoyed with things, why not get annoyed with Henin for just walking away? I just don’t get it at all.
“Henin was a Federer type player and a rarity because she is a female,” you say, but we’ve had female players before who play with that much variety. Martina Navratilova is still my favorite player on the women’s side. Your comment suggests that another woman may not be as capable of playing that way, hence the “rarity” classification. We will get more of them, we just may not have all that many of them right now. Tennis is not in a time right now where we will see the variety we may have had twenty years ago, or even ten. But the game is still very compelling. We have big pace now, big serving, guys will still come to net but they do it differently now, and taking the ball early will continue to be a big deal. I ain’t suffering(!)
For me, it was too much of a struggle to like the woman personally, and yes, we do take on players and “like” them for personal attributes as well as their game styles. That’s how the bonding takes place. I had to work too much with Henin, I just found her too negative and not always fully respectful of her opponents. But then I have thought that of the Williams sisters at times too. Her sportsmanship level was not always there.
I say again what I said, I liked Henin’s style of play, it is my own perfect style of play, but is it the only one we should see all the time? No. But at the start of the year when I looked at the women’s tour, I was for some reason already factoring in other people, and not Justine. Now I had no inclination she was ready to quit, but clearly some of us were feeling that a shift was already happening.
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