I have a lot of different thoughts about this match, but I'm gonna go with, you just can't have a good day all the time. And Sloane has just been up and down all year. She has not been very mentally tough. And today she just had too many errors. A bunch of winners. But a lot more errors. And that's sort of a credit to Larsson. Because she really did give Sloane all sorts of different balls. Different spins, straight up junk balls, and she would take the pace off of them and then inject the pace again. It was a very smart game plan. And it worked well in the first set but not enough. Sloane was up 3-0 in the second and should have held out to finish it off. But from 3-0 love up in the second she only won 3 more games the whole match. Too many errors. So she could have found a way around Larsson's variety and did for a while. But whatever switched on or off in her mind just caused her to have too many errors.
She just needs to hit the practice court. The slams are done for the year. She's got to try to find some ground after the Open so she can stay in the top 30 or 40, maybe get back into the top 20. She needs to put in some hard work. You don't really get to this level without putting in hard work, so she's done it. But since she's been around the top she hasn't gone in and done the hard work to get to another level in my opinion. I mean, she has yet to be in a WTA level final. All her younger peers have 1, 2, 3, or 4 titles to their name and she's just running around getting to qfs. She's got too many weapons to not find a way to put it all together and come up with wins.
