The Quebec Indoor week sets the tone for the remainder of the year as we see high octane tennis in Asia, as well as the European Indoor swing that concludes at the end of the year, including the all-important WTA Year Ending Championships; normally in Istanbul in the Sinan Erdem Dome but now in the ‘Singapore Indoor Stadium’.
In Quebec City, the field’s been rather depleted this season, with many top players choosing to take some additional rest leading into the Asian calendar swing. The most notable absentee was Canadian Genie Bouchard, who had a public exchange of words with the tournament organizer of the Hong Kong Tennis Open, which also took place this week. That was probably the most stifling piece of news but one of the standout notes of Quebec, tennis-wise, was the continuing resurgence of Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, now thirty-two years of age and a former child prodigy of this sport. She’ll face off against thirty-four year old Venus Williams tomorrow, who made her 75th final of her career, edging her even closer to the top of the ‘WTA Finals made’ list, where she is currently number eight in the history of tennis.
The Quebec final should be quite intriguing as both players have grown accustomed over the years to bludgeoning the tennis ball into oblivion. For anyone who doesn’t recognize Mirjana Lucic-Baroni, her game was built around a good grass game, where she excelled at the tender age of sixteen, subsequently making the semi-finals of Wimbledon back in 1999. That still stands from this date forward as her greatest achievement on a singles court, as her career hadn’t quite reached the heights that many had predicted for her. As I said, her game revolves around taking the ball on the rise and stemming a lot of her game around a big first serve, which will come into play when we see two big servers as she faces Venus.
The big talking point will be who out-blasts the other on an indoor carpet surface, which is very rare in tennis now with the ATP circuit discontinuing its association with indoor carpet for the last five years. The carpet texture is generally a high-fast surface which plays slightly faster than the outdoor and indoor hard surfaces you witnessed in 2014. Moreover, carpet gives less bounce like you see on a grass court, which explains how we have Venus Williams and Mirjana Lucic-Baroni in the final, as it plays very similarly in one aspect to the grass courts in Wimbledon. It’s worth mentioning Wimbledon semi-finalist Lucie Safarova won the Tournai de Quebec last year, so you can see the similarities in the success rates of previous Wimbledon successors. Even if you go back to 2012, Kirsten Flipkens, who has a great slice and dice game for the grass, won this tournament, so there’s no coincidence as to the finalists we have as they truly thrive off playing on these sort of surfaces.
Both players will enjoy the lack of wind factor; we’ve already seen this week that Venus has been serving a lot of double faults so the fact that the weather doesn’t play its part means that there aren’t any other variables which affect the match means that it is effectively out of their hands, improving the contest. Mirjana and Venus should duke it out in a three set match, with Venus winning but the match having its peaks and troughs with one player asserting her dominance on the match.
It’ll be a good week for Mirjana who’s in her first WTA final since 1998 and has just come off a Fourth Round showing at the US Open; in fact she’s ten wins to one single loss since participating in the US Open. Venus, on the other hand has that Montreal final run in her back pocket, while both Venus and Lucic-Baroni both lost to Sara Errani at Flushing Meadows.
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