A "Star" is Born

Azarenka wins the biggest title of her career thus far, beating the defending champion and current number 1 Serena Williams in the Miami final, 6-3 6-1 last week.



Despite Serena being injured, the final wasn't a foregone conclusion from start to finish. In fact, had Serena landed a few more big shots in the first set, gotten a big more luck, she may have taken the first set and let Azarenka just self-destruct from there on in. However, the tour's unluckiest player finally gets lucky. And in this current hole at he top of the WTA, Azarenka is taking every chance she can get.
She's overachieving of course; she's a shotmaker, but not of the same calibre of other supernova's we've seen over the years.

Azarenka returns Serena's serve excellently. In the first set, Serena make the decision to go full out on serves and one of the things which took her by surprise was the consistency with which Azarenka was able to return her big flat ones, especially down the tee. I've already stated that while have some similar attributes as Vera Zvonareva, she doesn't quite have the same resourcefulness. However, I think in the first set she showed she is capable of returning big first serves by whatever means possible.

Serena throughout was heavily impaired by a knee injury, and needed to resort to her first strike or die tactics in order to wins points. Her defense couldn't be up to scratch so whenever she was forced onto the defense, the point was over save for a random unforced error from the opposition. Serena played lackluster tennis from her very first match of the tournament, yet it was still good enough to make the final on one leg. Not good signs for the WTA.

There are two ways to look at Serena playing the final. One is that she was extremely noble for doing so considering she was clearly far from 100%, and that it was fantastic that she could give the crowd something for their money. On the other hand, her motivations were likely not completely selfless. She was likely desperate to hold onto the number one spot and believed there was still a chance Azarenka would panic and self-destruct in the biggest match of her career thus far.

From the way this tournament panned out, we can deduce that the WTA just can't get a lucky break right now. even things that look like positives for the tour, such as Azarenka emerging as a future possible household name by beating this generations greatest player in a big final, come about in the lamest of fashions possible.

The tour gets another dud final, and another player wins something by default. Then again, the only way Vicky probably would have won yesterday was by something like this occurring so maybe it's not all that bad.

Azarenka's shotmaking is quite low percentage because she doesn't possess the same raw power as say a Williams sister or an Ivanovic. She needs to go much closer to the lines and hit over higher parts of the net much more often than those aforementioned. This means her game probably requires a whole lot of upkeep, and alot of focus. Her semi-final match against Kuznetsova had some breathtakingly intense baseline duels. While it wasn't the cleanest of matches, it was still dramatic and included some terrific shotmaking. It was further testament of how risky Azarenka needs to play it against the big guns. Even on mid-court put-away balls, she needs to paint sidelines in order to get the ball past Kuznetsova. One feels that her game is often played on a knifes edge; the smallest of changes could disrupt her rhythm and confidence and she'd start spraying errors.

Azarenka is very hard working, and is currently overachieving, as is La Borz, in this current lull at the top of the WTA. It's much better for the game for someone with a game like Vika's, than a game like La Borz, yeah? Either way Azarenka isin't going to be the star that the WTA are trying to advertise her as. Her unimaginative gamestyle, and along with the fact she's not the typical "it" girl means she's just not all that marketable.

Speaking of La Borz, the Danish ballbashing wannabe chalked up another big scalp in her career, beating Dementieva in the fourth round 7-5 6-4. Dementieva's joke of a mid-court game becomes very apparent in this match-up. She beats La Borz off the ground, easily, but she's absolutely clueless about how to finish off floaty junk. On how many occasions did she let defensive crap just float back to the baseline and just neutralise the point all over again? A ridiculous amount, that's for sure.

If anything, Dementieva's court sense has disimproved so far this year. So many times did she get drawn into lengthy backhand to backhand rallies when everyone knows La Borz can moonball, junkball or whatever deep 'til the end of time and a couple of hard, flat crosscourt forehands from Dementieva would have ended the point in 2, 3 maybe less shots. Dementieva should NEVER lose to La Borz, and that's the sad thing.

Sure a victory for La Borz, but I see no sign of her tennis improving. I just hope to God we avoid seeing her in the final against a Williams. The WTA is losing enough credit amongst its die-hards as it is.