Alex said:
I don't think Woz is going to amount to more than whatever level she's playing at now if she doesn't make some vast improvements in her game. She has to develop some sort of weapon. Remember the Indian Wells final this year where she hit literally like two or three winners in the entire match against Masha?!
Forget about the likes of a Sharapova, Serena or Azarenka. They are not her problem. Her problem is that these days she's losing to every non-entity out there. Usually she can't string enough wins together anymore to get to the stage where she gets to play the top girls. That's where her level is at now. Although the ranking list tells us otherwise, she's no longer a top 10 player. If she were, say, #80 now there's no way she'd work herself back up into the top 10, or even the top 30 with the state that her game is in. As of now she she still profits from getting a relatively high seeding at tournaments, but if she doesn't sort herself out real soon that won't last for very long anymore.
And all this is not because she hasn't developed that ever elusive weapon. In fact, her trying to develop one might be part of the problem. So what if pundits criticized her defensive game? So what if posters on tennis forums call her a "pusher." Who cares? She was doing great. Perhaps not great enough to win a major (although with her regularly getting to the latter stages of the hardcourt slams she might have had an outside chance of winning one sooner or later), but great enough to become arguably the most despised, ridiculed and hated player in WTA history. That's an honour because it means that she was doing far better that they wanted her to.
But she somehow let the relentless criticism get to her, and the end result is that she neither has a 'weapon' (in fact even her backhand is a lot less potent these days than it used to be) plus she is nowhere near as effective a defensive player as she used to be. She now makes as many errors in a single game on routine shots as she used to make in a set when she was doing well. In other words, forget about a weapon. Her biggest problem is that her core game has become a complete mess. Besides, although it's never credited as such her making a minimum of UE as she was doing during her reign as #1 was a weapon of sorts, especially on the WTA tour where many players are making an almost obscene number of UE. People may have argued that matches were always "on her opponent's racquet," but my reaction to all that when I heard that remark was, "So what? The one you want to win is still going to lose, so perhaps she should get herself a new racquet because this one is not gonna get it done." And 80% of the time I was right. In my modest opinion it's always a mistake to change a winning formula and mess with a players' core game. The way to improve is not by trying to become something you're not but by trying to improve each part of your game by 1% and then by another 1%.
As a sidenote, I'll never understand all of the vitriol that she gets for her personality. People really, really dislike her. I guess the moral of the story is - don't show to anyone else that you really want to be loved. It's weird, because I thought people (especially guys) liked blondes with nice bodies who are extremely bubbly and friendly. (Now I'm just waiting for someone to reply and say she's physically unattractive...)
There are no doubt several reasons for that, but when all is said and done I think that tells us a whole lot more about "people" than about Caroline Wozniacki. We live in cynical times where every bi... or a..hole is praised for being cool and 'real' while every nice person is ridiculed and criticized for being a fake. But hard as it may seem to believe, there are some genuinely nice people out there - they are a minority perhaps, but they are there. And Caroline happens to be one of them. Pretty much everyone she has worked with, all of the other players, tournament organizers and wta suits, fans who have come in contact with her, and so on all confirm that. When you see documentary footage of when she was 10 or 12 years old she was just as bubbly and sweet as she is now. In other words, it's not just an act. It's how she really is. And people who have a problem with that should pehaps question their own character and not Caroline's.
