Iga Swiatek was unbeaten at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart before her match against Elena Rybakina, and she spoke about what went wrong in the defeat.
Before the match against the Kazakhstani player, no one managed to beat Swiatek on the clay courts in Stuttgart. She played two times at the WTA 500 event and won it both times.
That didn’t happen this year, as Rybakina bested her in the semi-final. One day later, she went all the way and lifted the trophy. The loss was painful for Swiatek, but it wasn’t that terrible because she didn’t feel too pressured to win the match.
Speaking after the match, world number one pointed towards serving as the culprit for her loss. She’s not the best server in the world, and there are aspects of her game that could be better, especially when compared to Rybakina, who has a monster serve among her peers.
The indoor conditions allowed Rybakina to cruise through her service games because she served well, while Swiatek had to work very hard for every game.
“Honestly, I don’t think it was any of these cases. It was just, you know, this kind of day where I served worse. I’ll try to be more consistent. I wasn’t feeling like a lot of pressure. Maybe a little bit in the third set, but still I think at the beginning the reason was kind of in me, not on the outside.”
She generally finds a way to overcome her serve on most days, but that day was a bit different, as Rybakina was just too good. She will certainly work on it because the serve is crucial, especially on the WTA Tour, where more and more players are playing the hyper-attacking, powerful baseline style of play.
“Yeah, I doubted my serve a little bit in the third set, and I’ll try to not have situations like that. But for sure it wasn’t easy to see her winning her service games pretty easily and me struggling basically on every game.”
