Victoria Azarenka crushes Monica Niculescu for title win – Luxembourg Open 2011
Top seeded Belarusian Victoria Azarenka vanquishes Romanian Monica Niculescu’s dream of winning a WTA title after earning a straight set victory at the title round of the BGL BNP Paribas Luxembourg Open 2011, a WTA International
level tournament held on the indoor hard courts in Luxembourg City in Luxembourg. She registered a 6-2, 6-2 success over the 24-year-old Romanian to shelf her third title of the season on Sunday.
World number four and the highest ranked player of this tournament, Azarenka breezed past the Romanian, ranked twenty-five spots below her, for the fourth straight time at the Luxembourgian hard courts. She not only clinched her
eighth WTA career title but also bagged in the $220,000 prize money.
After the Romanian held her serve in the opening game, the seed surfaced her form to go on a five game killing spree before Niculescu could hold on again. She then kept her serve once more to clinch the opener with a 6-2 score
line.
Azarenka stayed on the savage mode for the final set as she bombarded powerful groundstrokes and angled shots to reel off first three games in a row before gifting away her serve. The Belarusian exchanged another break after this
but wiped out last two games to seal the set with a 6-2 victory again.
Summing up the 22-year-old’s performance, Azarenka clobbered a higher first serve share of 80 percent as compared to Romanian’s 71 percent and registered a fabulous 68 percent win on it. In addition to this, she brushed off three
out of five breakpoints faced and capitalised on six out of ten breakpoint opportunities to her advantage to win comfortably.
"Monica has a unique game, a really different style," the blooming Belarusian said. "You really have to dig deep and be patient against her, but you also have to be aggressive. If you stand there and just dig the balls back, she
can beat you. So I just tried to stay aggressive and fight for every point and I'm happy how it turned out."
"I was surprised a little bit that I reached my first final indoors! But I'm very happy I could end the season like this," said the first time Romanian finalist. While the Romanian now waits for the next season to start, Azarenka
goes on ahead to compete in the elite eight women field at the season ending TEB BNP Paribas WTA Championships in Istanbul.
Tags: