On 5/26/2025 12:28 PM, Sawfish wrote:
On 5/26/25 9:39 AM, Scall5 wrote:
What happened to Emma? She was playing well on the clay this year.
She must have lost early, then?
She's a likeable admirable player, with lots of guts, and I think she
has sex appeal--could she be a crypto-Romanian as well?--but if you
watch her enough you can see the major weaknesses in her game.
I think maybe early on she came to trust her defensive ability, and as a consequence she is lacking in quickly transitioning to an offensive
position on court. She reflexively moves to a defensive position if
there is any uncertainty about what her opponent is likely to do with
the ball Navarro just hit to her.
So she minimizes her chances to go offensive from the baseline. A great contrast to this is Sinner, who quickly moves into the court if it looks
to him like he'll get even a neutral ball back. Alcaraz keeps him from
doing this better than anyone else.
Now, Navarro has a little bit of offense in her stroke production, but
not much, and she *needs* aggressive court position to offset this.
And given that she has no serve to speak of, you can see that this will
have to change if she wants to go any higher in the rankings.
The shocker to me was that she lost 0-6, 1-6 to the 68th player in the
world, Jessica Bouzas Maneiro. This after she got to a final of a clay
court tournament last week.
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Scall5
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