Now here’s a fascinating thing: boys are different from girls. I noticed that a while ago. So it’s no use expecting women’s tennis to be the same as men’s tennis.
Women tend to do quite a lot of things differently. The rhythm of their matches, their season and their careers is always different from the rhythms of the men’s game.
People are always making judgments on “the state of the women’s game” by comparing it with the men’s game. They see every way that the women’s game differs from the men’s game as some kind of weakness, some kind of failure.
There are more one-sided games in women’s tennis than in men’s — but not because there is no depth of talent. It’s just the way it seems to be when women play the sport.
Matches are more liable to go along with the ranking system in women’s than in men’s tennis. Champions in women’s tennis tend to have a longer and more stable reign, which means that great female champions collect more grand-slam titles than great male champions. That does not mean that the women’s game is inferior. It means that it is played by women.
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And when you get to the sharp end of a tournament, the men will, on the whole, tend to get into prolonged head-butting competitions while the women will often produce lopsided sets and bizarre shifts of dominance. It’s not an inferior rhythm, it’s a different rhythm. So deal with it. Revel in it.
This Wimbledon is taking place in changing times. The Williams sisters have gone, creating a glorious opportunity for someone. Maria Sharapova is the clear favourite and she celebrated by going into her semi-final against the wonderfully promising Sabine Lisicki, of Germany, and promptly getting the yips.
In an utterly bizarre, tortuous and emotional encounter that was by turns devastating and dreadful, Sharapova won by the disappointingly pedestrian scoreline of 6-4, 6-3. It was within the sets and within the games that all the strange twists and turns took place. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you get in the men’s game. Perhaps the men’s game is the poorer for that.
The match began with Lisicki coming out of the blocks like Usain Bolt and charging away in the match. At 3-0 down, Sharapova was responding with some awful tennis, throwing in double faults and giving the impression that she was used to playing on a much larger court.
But a little thing like playing badly is not going to faze Sharapova. She managed to find her length and to get her voice back in tune with her racket, and she began to send her screamers to the far baselines. She began to outhit Lisicki and to outwit her with some clever variations. At the start of the match, Sharapova had looked demoralised; now she looked, well, moralised.
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The demoralising was happening on the other side of the net and Lisicki lost it a trifle tamely, Sharapova closing out with an ace accompanied by her best Harry-met-Sally vocalisation.
The classic women’s tennis fortune-reversal seemed complete as Sharapova motored to 3-0 in the second set. But then, impossibly, astonishingly, undeniably, she got the yips. She completely lost her serve. It was as strange a thing as I have seen on Centre Court, particularly when you consider that Sharapova is a former champion and the dominant presence in the competition since the Williamses departed.
She served 13 double faults in the course of nine service games. That adds up to a donation of three full games. She was opening service games with a double, she was closing service games with a double. And to make things worse, when she sacrificed pace for accuracy — at least get the damn ball in the court — Lisicki was murdering it. You felt that if Sharapova had to serve one more time, Lisicki would have her.
Lisicki broke for 3-5. If she had held serve then, the pressure on Sharapova’s serve might have given her the set, perhaps even the match. But Sharapova conjured up her best service returns of the match. It looked as if she would have to break to win, and break she did.
So Masha’s back. Injuries, the shoulder op, a lot of pain and misery and rehab. But after winning here as a child of 17, she is favoured to win it for the second time as a woman of 24 — still with the same glorious movement on the court and now with the added talent of giving the world’s dullest press conferences.
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“My toss was a little bit all over the place today. I’ll be working on it tomorrow,” she said. She’ll need to: I have gone through all the results throughout the entire history of Wimbledon and I have failed to come up with a single record of a player winning a final without a serve. Yesterday, by way of her double faults, she donated an average 1.45 points per service game. If she does that against Petra Kvitova, a player who seems to have had a fear bypass, she will come second.
Sharapova’s response to the problem is to pretend there is no problem, and perhaps it’s true that if you pretend hard enough, there really is no problem. These are two aggressive players who could cook up something of a classic. But it will do so by means of the dynamic of women’s tennis, a game with a rhythm and a logic of its own.
Women’s final
Maria Sharapova (Russ)
World ranking 6
Born April 19, 1987
Height 6ft 2in
Turned pro 2001
Career prize money $15,150,340
Career singles titles 23
Grand-slam titles 3 (Wimbledon 2004, US Open 2006, Australian Open 2008)
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Petra Kvitova (Cz)
World ranking 8
Born March 8, 1990
Height 6ft
Turned pro 2006
Career prize money $2,592,064
Career singles titles 4
Grand-slam titles 0 (best: Wimbledon final 2011, semi-final 2010)