Quote:
Originally Posted by Inglewood Jack
one of the crazier speculations I heard was that Genie lost too much weight this year in an attempt to get faster, and thus also lost a bunch of her baseline power.
I dunno how much sheer bulk adds to your hitting strength in tennis, I always thought it was more about technique, flexibility an leverage (length). why she would feel the need to be faster anyways is strange, since she played a lot of good defense last year. in fact, the big hitting women's champions often don't have to play a ton of defense at all because they're too busy ragdolling their opponents with titanic forehands.
on the WTA side, it does seem like you need to be 6+ feet tall with the ability to blast the other player off the court to have a chance at a major. all the other smaller, much more cerebral players (e.g. Halep, Radwanksa) just can't come up with a game plan to get around the Serenapova buzzsaw.
|
IMO she just got on a roll early in her career and now has hit a rough patch where she's lost confidence and her edge. Also it does appear there may be more distractions going on outside the court with all the attention she gets. I think she will eventually get things together but I'm somewhat cool on her chances of ever becoming a multiple grand slam champion as her first serve is mediocre and will likely never be a strength and her ground strokes are good but she simply doesn't have a killer shot. When your biggest strength is supposed to be your mental game it means you don't have a lot of weapons and we are seeing right now as she's not sharp mentally and isn't very competitive.