Simona Halep crashed out of the French Open Wednesday afternoon in Paris and her quest of winning her first Grand Slam title is over for the time being. The #3 ranked player in the world was routinely beaten 75 61 in straight sets by Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, who is the #70 ranked player on tour.
It is the second straight day a top 10 player bows out in Paris on the women’s side of the draw. Yesterday the struggling Genie Bouchard was beaten by Kristina Mladenovic in straight sets and today was Halep’s turn. It wasn’t a surprise to see Bouchard lose yesterday considering the poor year she’s having and although many experts picked Halep to win the title it is really no surprise that she is out early as well.
Since Halep lost to Serena Williams in three sets in the semifinals of Miami, her play has dipped on the clay. Prior to the clay court season she looked impressive winning three titles in Shenzhen, Dubai, and Indian Wells. It appeared she was on course to have another strong year, but that changed on the clay.
The 23-year-old has only six wins in four clay court tournaments this year giving her a poor record of 6-4. It did for a time though look like Halep righted the ship heading into Roland Garros when she reached the semifinals in Rome two weeks ago, but that completely changed when she lost to Carla Suarez Navarro. It is not that Halep lost, it’s how she lost. Halep hit 60 unforced errors in the three set match, a number completely unheard of from a player ranked #3 in the world.
Apparently the experts didn’t think much of her poor play as five of the eleven tennis analysts at ESPN chose Halep to still win the French Open, the most of any player chosen. To the casual tennis fan maybe that’s why Halep losing is more of shock than to those who follow tennis regularly. Nevertheless Halep did enter Roland Garros as the third seed giving her a favourable draw.
In her first match, the Romanian faced the World #90 Evgeniya Rodina. Even then Halep didn’t look comfortable on the clay and the score was much closer than it should have been. Halep surrendered a double break lead in the first set before finally winning it; then in the second set again she was broken, this time when serving for the match. She had to break again to close out that match.
All her struggle on clay this year makes today’s loss no surprise or shock. In fact, it was easy to predict. Today Halep struck just five winners the entire match and allowed her opponent, Lucic-Baroni, to dictate play. Lucic-Baroni had 29 winners and was just one game away from bageling Halep in the second set. Lucic-Baroni deserved the win.
As for Halep, she failed to defend a large chunk of points from reaching the final last year in Paris. From here the job doesn’t get any easier for her as she has semifinal points to defend at Wimbledon. She is probably happy to be back on grass though after how poorly her clay court season went.
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