The victory with Maria Sakkari in the final of the California event is the 11th consecutive victory for Iga Christmas. The triumphs in Doha and Indian Wells are the final proof that although the Polish woman likes to play on clay courts the most, she has achieved her greatest success so far in the form of winning Roland Garros, but also on faster surfaces she is among the world’s best.
– Iga looks great now. She found the perfect balance in the attack without taking big risks – says the most popular tennis journalist in the world, American Ben Rothenberg in an interview with Sport.pl. This seems to be a key change in her game. – Balancing between risk and a safe game is the most difficult thing in sport – Swiatek said in autumn during the tournament in Ostrava, when she lost to Sakkari. Her balancing was starting to fall out again.
Who is the best?
Is Iga Świątek the best tennis player in the world right now? – It’s hard to say if she’s the best, and that’s only because leader Ash Barty doesn’t perform regularly. But it’s clear to me that Ash and Iga are definitely the best today – says Rothenberg.
Barty won the Australian Open this year and in Adelaide (in the latter tournament she beat Świątek 6: 2, 6: 4). The Australian played the last game on January 29. Last season, she also had a few breaks – she did not perform, among others at the Championships of Champions in Guadalajara or Indian Wells.
Świątek has a dream start to the 2022 season. Within three months, she won two major tournaments in Indian Wells and Doha, and was in the semi-finals of the Australian Open and in Adelaide. She became the runner-up in the WTA ranking, she is at the top of the WTA Race ranking, which includes the results only for this year.
It is not the end. The Polish woman broke the unfavorable statistics from the previous season when she won the match only three times in which she lost the first set. This season, she has already won five such matches. She also began to beat her rivals from the top 10 in series, which she also had problems with in the second half of the previous season. In recent weeks she has defeated Maria Sakkari (twice), Anett Kontaveit and Arena Sabalenka.
A great start to cooperation with Radwańska and Świątek
The beginning of Iga Świątek’s cooperation with the new trainer Tomasz Wiktorowski is spectacular. It is difficult to get rid of the associations with the beginning of Wiktorowski’s work with Agnieszka Radwańska. This happened in mid-2011. A month later, Radwańska won the tournament in Stanford, and in October in Tokyo and Beijing, returned to eighth place in the WTA ranking and for the first time in her career qualified for the season-ending Tournament of Champions in Istanbul.
In the following season, the first one under the leadership of Wiktorowski, Radwańska moved up to the second place in the world – the highest in her career. She also reached the Wimbledon final. It was her best Grand Slam performance ever.
Wiktorowski changed Radwańska’s game quite quickly. It affects the career development of Świątek even faster. – First of all, you can see that Iga is not afraid to be aggressive. She understood that the most important thing is what she makes during the match, not whether she makes a mistake or throws the ball over the line by 10 cm. The key to whether the decision was right or the plan was right. If the thoughts of “attack or play safe” appear in the retour, such moments of hesitation often contribute to mistakes –
The experts were surprised
The circumstances of the coach change were quite surprising. On November 30, the Polish tennis player organized a conference summarizing the 2021 season. A successful season, in which she permanently entered the top 10, she won two tournaments (Adelaide, Rome) and was the only one in the world to reach at least the fourth round of each of the four Grand Slam tournaments. Nevertheless, a few days after the conference, she announced that she was leaving coach Piotr Sierzputowski.
Tomasz Wiktorowski became the new trainer. The change took place less than a month before the first tournament of the new season in Adelaide, one and a half months before the Australian Open Grand Slam. Experts feared that there might be insufficient time. And although Wiktorowski also got to know each other during the games, the beginning of their cooperation was better than probably anyone could have predicted.
– I was a bit surprised by the change of the coach, because Iga had a very good season in 2021. But already in January it was clear to me that Iga and Daria Abramowicz are satisfied with the new voice in the team, it was evident – Rothenberg concludes.
Source: Sport
Tristin is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.
