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by Pete Bodo*
Since sometime last week, Bernard Tomic hasn't been able to step into an intersection without some motorist rolling down his window and shouting, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi, shortly before he rear-ends the Kia SUV sitting at the stoplight up ahead. That kind of thing doesn't happen to Agnieszka Radwanska, probably not even in her home town of Krakow, Poland.
Granted, Tomic is an Australian, and at 6-foot-5 he's hard to miss. But he's ranked No. 38 and now out of the Australian Open, a fourth-round victim of No. 3 seed Roger Federer. Aggie Radwanska, half of the second most successful sister act in pro tennis, is the No. 8 seed in the tournament, and she'll be playing No. 3 Victoria Azarenka in the quarterfinals tonight. Aggie had a doozy of a first-round match, barely surviving fierce, face-painter and Comanche impersonator Bethanie Mattek-Sands. Since then, though, Aggie has lost a grand total of just 10 games.
Is there anyone more under the radar of the fans, pundits, media and Twitterati than Aggie?
I'll bet that when Aggie presents her laminated photo-credential at the register in the player's lounge cafeteria, the clerk asks her for as second piece of positive ID. This is going to seem like an even funnier joke when Aggie goes out there and defends so well against Azarenka's angry blasts that the favorite turns blue in the face and passes out. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Radwanska is just 22; she's a solid 5-foot-8, and moves very well. One reason she's so easily overlooked in the tournament handicapping exercises is that she plays an extremely conservative baseline game; nobody is going to confuse this one with, say, Francesca Schiavone.
But the longer you watch Aggie, the more appealing that fluid, disciplined, class game may appear. She's got what the wine snobs might call a "subtle bouquet." She's certainly grown on me, and I've come to appreciate the similarities to Jelena Janovic, even if Radwanska's game doesn't quite scream "look at me" with the same level of urgency, and Aggie is on the whole somewhat less of an athlete. That's fine, because she's also far more level-headed and pulled together than Jelena.
Aggie is a very "now" player, in that she freely hits either forehand or backhand from an open stance, and one good way to predict how well she'll do on any given day is by tracking her ratio of cross-court to down-the-line shots. She's got that conservative instinct to go cross-court, and enough accuracy to force an opponent to lace 'em up for side-to-side sprints. But you don't win the big matches these days unless you can threaten to pull the trigger and go down the line almost any danged time you please. It's what keeps the other girl—or guy—honest.
Radwanska's serve is a soft spot. She has a nice, smooth action and her placement is accurate, but she doesn't generate enough pace to use it as a weapon. Also, she seems to make very little use of the serve to the body, the one that jams an opponent. That's a costly oversight, because serving to the corners when your average first serve is barely 90 MPH, and you're second delivery is usually a good 15 MPH slower, can be taken as a pretty good invitation to get ball smacked right back down your throat. Why let your opponents take a big cut?
But even when she's blasted back on her heels by a good service return, or groundstroke, Radwanska can push back, flicking half-volleys off her shoe-tops right at the service notch. She's got terrific feel and hands (hence the deft drop shots that can be so useful to end cross-country rallies), which is why I think she'll pull off a big upset tonight, even though Azarenka is playing extremely well.
Azarenka likes to punish the ball, and the internal dial on her pace-o-meter goes only one way—up. That's fine, until you start missing, and then the whole thing gets shot to hail. Aggie's main job is to get one more ball back; she's capable of doing that, and she can call on some guile as well to flummox Azarenka. Aggie has good stores of stamina, too, in case the match goes long.
Aggie had some injury issues that set her back recently, but she had a great fall in 2011, winning back-to-back tournaments in Tokyo (d. Vera Zvonareva in final) and Beijing (d. Andrea Petkovic in final). She's already played Azarenka this year, a few weeks ago in the semifinals at Sydney. Azarenka won that one in three sets. In the previous round, though, Radwanska had toppled top-seeded and world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki. She might have been a bit played out, emotionally. Azarenka leads the head-to-head 6-3, but they're 1-1 in most recent matches.
Gig 'Em, Aggie is, officially, the rallying cry of teams from Texas A&M University, but it will do until Aggie is better known. Who knows, by the end of this week Radwanska may find herself standing on a corner in Melbourne when she hears someone call out, Polska, Polska, Polska, Oi, Oi, Oi.