This Things I Believe (3)
Osaka
Dont know if plagiarize is the right word here…we are going to cite our source. There is a very knowledgeable (seems to me, anyway) guy on youtube named Cam Williams who will often do watch-alongs for tennis matches. He does Osaka’s match today, where she winds up losing to someone named Marketa Vondrousova. My spell check just exploded. I trust this guy for his insights and we are going to transcribe about a minute long quote of his in regards to this match and how it relates to potential Osaka tendencies…
“If youre going ‘what the Hell happened,’ this is what happened. Vondrousova came out here with a game-plan, of being aggressive and making Osaka move. She made her move…thirty-two unforced errors for Osaka…she made Osaka hit 32 errors, and the reason why I say made…she came out here with a game-plan, super aggressive, ultra-aggressive game-plan…and that made Osaka try and go for shots she wasnt comfortable to hit, she was trying to go for winners too early, Osaka, and that just filtered into missing so many shots…and she just made so many errors…errors, errors, errors…Vondrousova made Osaka make those errors. That is the blueprint on how to beat Osaka on a hard-court. A very similar scoreline, we saw Sakkari do that in Miami, Sakkari did the same thing, came out aggressive…Osaka gets a little stressed and goes ‘Hang on, Im supposed to be the dominating player here, why are you hitting winners?’ And then she gets a little stressed and she makes terrible errors…thats what happened today.”
Now the point of this series of blurbs is to try to drill down to true statements. Cam is including some hypothesizing about possible thoughts going through Osaka’s mind and how this affects her play. What we can say for the purpose of this entry, as Cam notes, 2 of Osaka’s most recent losses on hard-court are to players utilizing an ultra-aggressive game-plan. Osaka hits 32 errors vs Vondrousova and 23 vs Sakkari in Miami, losing both matches in straight sets. Is there a correlation between a super-attacking style and Osaka’s high unforced error total and eventual defeats? We cannot say for absolute certain, but recent results would suggest this scouting report/analysis has merit. Considering Osaka has won the last 2 majors on hard-court this is notable.
