Stosur vs Schiavone French Open final preview
Women’s tennis will have a new Grand Slam champion when Sam Stosur and Francesca Schiavone shake hands at the net after Saturday’s final. The question is: who will it be?
Stosur will enter the final as the hottest of favourites after a giant-killing run through her last three matches where the Australian defeated four-time champion Justine Henin, and world No 1 Serena Williams in three set battles before obliterating another of the tournament favourites, Jelena Jankovic, in the semis.
The hard work done, the seventh seed is, at least on paper, facing the prospect of an easier match in the final. Stosur and Schiavone have played one another five times previously, with Stosur holding the 4-1 advantage over the Italian who has not won a match against the Queenslander since their first meeting in 2005.
Importantly, Stosur has achieved two of her victories over Schiavone on clay, including in the first round of last year’s French Open. Twelve months later, and they’re contesting the final.
The pair’s most recent match was also in a final, on the hard courts in Osaka in 2009, where in her sixth appearance in the final of a WTA Tour singles final, Stosur finally emerged as the champion rather than as runner-up.
“I played very good that day in Osaka, and that was great to win my first title,” Stosur said as she aims for the third, and biggest, title of her career. “So if it happens again Saturday, then that would just be unbelievable.”
The frightening thing for Italy’s first female Grand Slam finalist is that Stosur has only improved since their last match against one another in October 2009. That thumping topspin forehand remains a potent weapon, and the 26-year-old’s big kick serve continues to cause headaches for her opponents – nowhere more than on the dirt courts the 17th seed has recently developed a penchant for kissing.
Stosur enters the final with a 20 win, two loss record on clay this year, the best 2010 clay court record of any women’s player and riding high on confidence after her three most recent victories.
There’s a newfound self-belief and ability to cope with expectations about the 26-year-old that even as she pushed towards the top-10 at the start of the year, Stosur didn’t seem to possess in front of her home crowd at the Australian Open.
Sure, she wobbled when attempting to close out the matches against Henin and Williams at Roland Garros but there was no sign of any such nerves in her commanding victory over Jankovic last time around.
It’s tough to see Schiavone dismantling Stosur the way she took Caroline Wozniacki’s defensive game apart in the quarter-finals: the Australian will simply fight fire with fire if the 29-year-old decides to attempt to snatch victory with another onslaught on outright aggression.
And if Schiavone struggled to break Elena Dementieva’s notoriously fragile serve in the semi-finals – she converted just one of four break point chances in the one set the match lasted – the mind boggles at how she’ll find a way through the service bombs that Stosur will be throwing down at her.
“All through my juniors up until now, it [the kick serve] has been a strength of mine and a weapon, and it's got better and better as the years have gone on,” Stosur told reporters after her semi-final victory. “I think it is a rarity, so I can kind of pull it out or set myself up for the points in different ways than maybe some girls can, because I can hit that serve.”
That leaves Schiavone’s ability to mix up her game with slice and net play as perhaps her best chance of unsettling Stosur. It would certainly provide something different for the Brisbane-born player to look at than what she faced against Williams and Jankovic. But if Henin, who possesses the most effective all-court game and deftest touch in women’s tennis, couldn’t overcome Stosur in the fourth round, surely Schiavone won’t do it.
Today, Stosur is on the verge of becoming Australia’s first women’s Grand Slam champion since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won her seventh major title at Wimbledon in 1980.
Tomorrow, she should break that 30-year drought.
Prediction: Sam Stosur, French Open champion.
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