NEW YORK—“I don’t know how I had the power to win this match,” Simona Halep said a few seconds after her 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 victory in a mesmerizing tug of war with Victoria Azarenka on Wednesday.
Halep’s most famous catchphrase is “fighter girl,” which is how likes to describe herself. But “power” is another common theme, and her focus on it is understandable. She’s just 5’6” (max) and 132 pounds, smaller than the WTA norm, and against the top players she often looks like she’s playing uphill. Halep has the speed, the timing, and the ball-striking down pat, but a little extra oomph would be nice now and then.
Halep normally finds something extra in the support of the Romanian fans who gather to chant her name wherever she goes. This week a very special Romanian, Nadia Comineci, has also lent her voice to the chorus at Flushing Meadows.
“I mean, she had perfect 10, first 10,” Halep said, a little breathlessly, of the Olympic gymnastics legend. “You know to have a great champion in your box, it give you power, that she appreciates what I’m doing.”
If you’re going to get a transfer of energy from a fellow athlete, you could do much worse than Nadia.
When Halep says power, though, she also means the kind that comes from within.
“I don’t have big muscles,” she said in her post-match press conference. “I’m not tall. I have inside power. Always it’s like big challenge for me. Every point is a big challenge. So I do everything I can.”
“It’s natural. It’s coming from inside...Maybe my parents gave me this.”
Halep talked about how aggressively she hit the ball today, how far she ran, how long she fought, and how much she has believed in herself at the Open so far. Simona moved fast, and hit faster.
“I was a little bit surprised by the pace of her ball, to be honest,” Azarenka said. The fact that Azarenka works with Halep’s former coach, Wim Fissette, shows that the Romanian was determined to bring more of the heat than normal today.
To me, though, what was most impressive—powerful, that is—about Halep’s game was how slowly she played it. It has been noted many times here that Halep loses patience with herself quickly and rushes when things don’t go her way. On Monday I wrote that Halep has a perfectionist streak, which is not uncommon; the difference with her is that she really does have the ability to play seemingly perfect tennis. When Halep comes down from the clouds and doesn’t live up to her sky-high expectations, she gets angry—racquet-banging angry—fast. But there was none of that against Azarenka.
It’s true that Halep was on her game from the start. She hit more winners—40—than the taller and stronger Azarenka, and she hit them in interesting ways. She wrong-footed the speedy Vika with her down-the-line backhand. She hustled forward in time to hit inside-in forehands, a shot that’s not part of her regular arsenal. And rather than let Azarenka dictate, as expected, Halep took the initiative in rallies with her forehand. Best was her backhand; half a dozen times she painted the sideline with it and left Azarenka staring at the mark, shaking her head.
“In the first set I played my best tennis,” Halep said, “and I knew that I have the game to win this match. But I also know that she’s very strong, and that she doesn’t give up in matches.”
Azarenka didn’t give up in this one, despite some shaky early form. The match was essentially a fight between Vika’s superior physical force and Halep’s superior timing and creative shotmaking. In today’s game, it’s usually force, rather than pure ball-striking, that wins out, and it may have in this one if it hadn’t been for a storm that delayed play at the start of the third set. That also happened to be the point where Azarenka had wrested control of the rallies and taken the lead for the first time.
When the rain stopped, Halep returned to the court with her power restored. She said that after taking a step back in the court in the second set, she and her coach, Darren Cahill, decided that she needed to move up again in the third.
“Thank god for raining,” Halep said afterward.
But while Halep failed to close out the match in the second set, she never rushed. She never bowed her head or looked disgusted with herself. She never took the ball from the ball kid and went straight into her next serve. She met every Azarenka advance with a counter-advance of her own, and instead of caving in when she lost the second set, the way she did in the quarterfinals at the Australian Open this year, she switched tactics. Halep had a sense early that she was hitting the ball too well to lose this match, and that sense never left her.
“I just have to go do everything I did in the first [set] and get this one,” Halep told herself at the start of the third set, "because it’s made for me.”
