Victoria Azarenka has had a tremendous career filled with numerous accolades. One including achieving the World #1 ranking as she went on to win one of her two Grand Slam victories in Melbourne. After an injury-ravaged three seasons, many tennis aficionados are now starting to pose the question of just whether The Belarusian can attain those particular heights and become an even greater champion of the women’s game.
At 26 years of age, the two time Grand Slam champion has made the semi-final or better in all of the four slams on the calendar, including Roland Garros on the clay, where she has often mentioned is her least favourite surface. Over the years, most notably in 2012, she demonstrated not only her hard court dominance, but also her ability to play well on all surfaces, which included two clay court finals- one in Stuttgart and another in the Madrid sunshine.
In 2012, Azarenka’s domineering stats matched that of Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova particularly on a hard court, with many suggesting that we were perhaps starting to see a Big 3 in the women’s game of professional tennis. A statement that many retracted after not only Serena elevated her game to even greater heights but the likes of Sharapova and Azarenka got set back indefinitely by injury upon injury.
The fall of Azarenka as a consistent elite player in the Women’s game began coincidentally after her second Grand Slam triumph, where she had to pull out of Indian Wells with a right ankle injury. That was the beginning of a sequence of injuries that continued to set Azarenka back even further in her new life as a multi Grand Slam winner. The most serious of set back’s came in the first round of Wimbledon back in 2013, where she had successfully won a set, then twisted her knee whilst turning on the grass. The chain of injury setbacks continued into 2014, this time with a foot problem that hurdled her progress throughout 2014. That injury became more apparent after peculiar defeats to the likes of Lauren Davis in Indian Wells.
The knee twist in Wimbledon was a freak incident, there have periods in Victoria Azarenka’s redevelopment as a player and reconstruction as an elite athlete that has really affected her progress over the last two and a half years. In the early days of the making of the champion, she very often retired in a great amount of events she played in throughout the tennis calendar. To some degree she gained a bit of a reputation from both the tennis fans at home and more prominently the tennis media. Many, , argue that Azarenka in many circumstances has decided to play through many injuries to thwart the backlash she’d get from retiring early from many events.
When she made the Carlsbad final against Sam Stosur, she played through a notable back injury and to a certain extent many have mentioned that perhaps she was actually winning matches on empty. That reflects the sort of character and fighting spirit she possessed at the time in 2012/2013, but it more recently in 2015 we are starting to see the ill-effects of Azarenka not being at the top of the game for a long time, and it’s showing.
That is down to a number of reasons, one being that players are starting to believe they can beat a player that in previous years many seen as unbeatable in the early months of 2012 in particular. On most surfaces she was hard to beat. On a hard court she was virtually unplayable at times. So, firstly I feel the gap between Azarenka from a mental standpoint and the rest of the field has shortened. Also, you’ve got to take into account that Azarenka herself hasn’t been untouchable for a while, which in turn can put doubts into her self confidence as an individual and as a tennis player.
So is Azarenka still a contender for these major titles year upon year? One factor that needs to be stressed is that she knows how to win these titles, which not many players on the WTA can say that they not only successfully claimed a grand slam crown, but they defended it the following year. Another positive element to Azarenka’s game that has never left her is that she still has one of the best tennis IQ’s in the game. People often commit to irrational statements that the finesse players like Agnieszka Radwanska are one of the most intelligent players, but if you watch Azarenka’s movement into the forecourt it’s exemplary. She knows when to up the pace of a rally and make her way into a drive volley and very often chooses the right time to make those advances. In modern tennis, at the elite level, it’s almost always about how a player takes advantage of the short ball, and even now Azarenka is still one of the best in the business in that forte.
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