Daniela got outplayed - simple

i think daniela should have the rest of the year off..

i think daniela should have the rest of the year off..

I think that would be stupid. She would go into the 2009 season with no form and would therefore struggle to defend any of her semi-final points at the Australian Open, and before we know it she would be outside the world's top fifty. We have witnessed the time it took for her to get back into the top ten the second time and I wonder whether she would be able to do it again from such a low ranking. I think if she manages to stay inside the top-twenty for the rest of this year then she will have a chance of returning to the top-ten from the middle of 2009 onwards. I think the rest of this year could be grim but if she sticks at it then she could be greatly rewarded in 2009.
As for now, lets hope for a better result in the US Open doubles.

i think daniela should have the rest of the year off..

I think that would be stupid. She would go into the 2009 season with no form and would therefore struggle to defend any of her semi-final points at the Australian Open, and before we know it she would be outside the world's top fifty. We have witnessed the time it took for her to get back into the top ten the second time and I wonder whether she would be able to do it again from such a low ranking. I think if she manages to stay inside the top-twenty for the rest of this year then she will have a chance of returning to the top-ten from the middle of 2009 onwards. I think the rest of this year could be grim but if she sticks at it then she could be greatly rewarded in 2009.
As for now, lets hope for a better result in the US Open doubles.

I think she needs some time off to relax and come back fresh or at least work on her game. Her confidence is at rock bottom and she looks drained. Her serve is horrible, I have never seen her serve look so bad for this long. She just needs to take a break and come back fresh. It worked for her after Madrid last year. I think continous losses like today will make it worse.

I watched the first set and up to 0-4 in the second set and then turned off in disgust. It was the most pathetic, gutless, error-strewn performance I have seen from her in years. She had no answer to ALG's big serves and heavy hitting, her own serve was feeble, one second serve even bounced before the net, it was a joke, and like so many of Daniela's other victors, all they had to do to win was play smart, get the ball back and wait for Daniela to smash another wild shot long, wide or into the net. It was ghastly to watch.

I didn't want to analyse the match because it WAS just that bad (can't count the amount of time that Dani just stood on the spot in utter disbelief as winners from ALG flew past her) But to me Daniela serve is very important to her game. She's not a dementieva were she can rely on her movement, if dani has no 1st serve then her entire game suffers. I don't even consider her second serve a serve.
Her serve is just to soft and easily punishable by top players. If only she had an ALG serve or just a decent serve....

I cant believe this... Im so sad for Daniela, this loss is going to do nothing for her confidence. Oh Danka... Dunno what to say anymore Hope you can get your groove back soon

This loss is very disappointing not so much because I predicted she'd win pretty handily or that it's the first round of a grand slam (that's part of it), but because of what it means in the bigger picture. Her performance over the past six weeks has been very underwhelming. She's yet to win more than one match in a row. She's losing to a wide array of players: you cannot get more disparate styles than Kleybanova/ALG and Cornet/Sugiyama. She's frequently losing big to players who are not clearly better than her (Caro) and to vastly inferior players (Govortsova and ALG).

More concerning for me was her very positive reaction to the events at New Haven. As someone who watched every point of the Cornet match, it was largely a poor performance. On the surface, losing in a tight third set to a player in the top twenty sounds OK, but the match told a different story. Cornet is only a so-so player away from clay and her performance lagged as well. She was less than fully mobile for much of the second set and her serving was weak. She was OK but certainly beatable. My initial report focused more on the high totals of errors, but on further reflection there's a larger issue I overlooked. Daniela's ability to strike the ball hard has greatly diminished. In that long match with Cornet, she couldn't muster a single ace (she had zero today, I think). Rarely would she pick up a cheap point on her first serve. Of course, the issue of her second serve struggles have been documented by many of us here for a while now. But there's also everything else that being a poor ball striker affects. It struck me today and against Cornet that she almost never fired a ball that got all the way to the back wall. She simply has a lost quite a bit off her fastball which prevented her from properly taking advantage of Cornet's weak second serve. Given how pathetic Groenefeld's movement is, you'd think that today Daniela would be hitting by her with great frequency but it didn't happen. We can talk as much as we want about how mental tennis is, about how strategy plays a key role, about the value of a good all-around game, but ultimately how hard you hit the ball is going to play a big role in how well you do. She had way too many second serves under 80 mph and some under 70mph today (and that's with what I think is a generous gun). And, again, the lack of powerful returns was striking.

Can she fix it? Certainly, Daniela can play at a much higher level than this. And not just for a set against Ivanovic or for a fortnight at Indian Wells, she has shown the aptitude to be a consistent top ten player with flashes of even better than that. It's not asking the physically impossible of her to serve better, strike harder and minimize her errors. We know she can, we have seen her do it. Will she? I have no question, nor have I ever, that she wants it bad enough and will work hard enough for it. But can she solve the problem? That much is in doubt. She had a prolonged period (parts of 2003-parts of 2005) where she played at well below her optimal capability. She clearly botched her recovery from her heel injury in the winter and spring (and arguably last fall, though that's less clear). Of course, she's had magnificent periods as well and managed a great comeback from #40 to as high as #7. So, her track record is mixed. The desire is not in question, but the judgment is. Her performance at New Haven was not good enough (lest we forget she and Lindsay lost in doubles to a poor team as well). More disappointing was the fact that she seems to think, publicly anyway, that it was. We (if I can speak for us) see the problem but I, at least, have absolutely no clue as to how to fix it. I'm not the tennis professional.The question for Daniela and the one that will determine how successful the last of her peak athletic years are remains how quickly can she remedy what's ailing her game.