After suffering a 0-6, 6-4, 6-2 defeat to Kirsten Flipkens in Toronto, Venus Williams admits she’s not all the way back health-wise. Williams, who was playing her first match since losing in the first round of Roland Garros, did not serve at her normally fast speed. She has been struggling with a back injury for the past year.
“I just really started serving a lot more in the last week, so I’m not really 100 percent on the serve yet,” she said. “So, to me, it was better not to take too many risks and just do something I felt more comfortable with. This week I will definitely be practicing my serve a lot more and getting more confident in it and more comfortable with serving out there. So definitely today my service games I didn’t feel like myself, because usually I step up to the line, I go for it a lot, but I didn’t really feel like I could do that today.”
Williams said that she wants to get more matches, but prior to the U.S. Open will only play Cincinnati next week, electing not to play New Haven. She said she may have come back a week too early but does not want to arrive in New York with almost no match play.
“Coming back from injury, you have to build the confidence to just realize that you can come back and play without pain,” she said. “So I feel like I’m in that threshold of building confidence, and I really want to be able to play matches before the U.S. Open. That’s a lot of what happened to me at the French, too. I played an intense and a really fun, exciting match, but I hadn’t played any matches. So it was like just a tough situation to be in. Do you play or you don’t play? So I feel like kind of in that situation now going into the U.S. Open. Do you play or don’t play?”
The 33-year-old American, who is also battling an autoimmune disease, also said she has no plans to play doubles.
“I have to be really easy on my back now,” she said. “I can’t force it. Doubles would be awesome, but it’s not an option right now. Hopefully I will just be able to obviously play at the Open.”