GENIE BOWS OUT EARLY
Wimbledon loss extends 2015 skid
“She was supposed to be the saviour of tennis,” said the British reporter in press row at Court 3, “and now everyone has come to bury her.”
One can argue with both parts of that statement, but Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard began — and finished — her Wimbledon with a performance that won’t convince anyone to put away their shovels, with a straight-sets (7-6, 6-4) loss to Chinese qualifier Ying-Ying Duan on Tuesday.
“I definitely felt a little tight in the first set, but I also felt very unprepared for this match,” said the 21-year-old Montrealer afterward. “That’s unfortunate.”
It was the fourth time since the Australian Open in January that Bouchard lost to someone outside the top 100 in the WTA ranking — Duan was 117th entering the tournament. It was also Bouchard’s eighth exit in the first round this year, and 14th match loss, against only eight wins. By way of comparison, Duan, with her triple-digit ranking, is now 10-9 in 2015 (including 6-4 in lower level ITF events).
Bouchard, game as ever in a long post-match media session, said she suffered an abdominal tear at Eastbourne last week and wouldn’t have played unless in a tournament as big as this one. She had practised for the first time since the injury on Monday, and didn’t hit any serves until Tuesday. Her timing was noticeably off: she put only 55 per cent of her first serves in play and committed 10 double faults, which more than washed out her four aces.
Doctors told her that “(it) probably wouldn’t have been so smart to play here, but I couldn’t pass on Wimbledon. So I did kind of minimal preparation to save myself for the match.”
The injury was just the latest bump in a brutal 12 months for Bouchard, who reached the finals in her last appearance at the All England Lawn Tennis Club to cap an out-of-nowhere rise that saw her crack the top 10 of the WTA rankings, from 147th just a season earlier. This season has included quick losses, injury layoffs, long losses, a new coach and new management, and seemingly every type of setback. What it has not included is many wins.
“I feel like, you know, each time I had a loss, there were different reasons for each one. And today there was a different reason for this one,” Bouchard said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened at my favourite tournament of the year, and that I won’t get to play any more matches here this year. But I’m going to try to put it behind me and look forward.”
But Tuesday’s loss was also quite typical: Moments where Bouchard looked like the player who reached at least the semifinals of three 2014 Grand Slams, interspersed among a lot of shots that were more worthy of a late qualifier.
Despite a strongly pro-Genie crowd — there was more support for her on Tuesday than there was for Milos Raonic on the same court on Monday — she was thumped in the first-set tiebreaker and never gained a lead over Duan in the second set.
Now, about that whole saviourof-tennis thing. It’s true that Bouchard became a star in the summer of 2014, a fact that was partly due to her Grand Slam play and partly due to her moviestar good looks. But Bouchard didn’t ask to become the face of the women’s game, and as ESPN analyst Chris Evert noted in a conference call last week, she lost in the first round nine times last year, too. Expectations for her this season were almost certainly too high among fans and observers, that is, but it’s possible that the Bouchard camp got ahead of itself, too: moving on from coach Nick Saviano looks like a worse and worse call with each first-round loss. Asked about her lack of success with Sam Sumyk, and whether she had considered another change, Bouchard smiled and said “Maybe I should?” — clearly intending the remark as a joke. But she said player and coach believe in each other, and that she expects better results.
When those might come is unclear. She plans to heal, and take some time away from the game, Bouchard said, then will prepare to come back and try to reclimb the heights of last season.
“In a way I’m going to be kind of happy to put this period behind me, for sure,” Bouchard said. “I’m very disappointed in my last couple of months … So, yeah, I’m going to be looking forward to not having people ask me every single day about the (rankings) points I have to defend. That will be nice.”
She won’t be able to totally evade scrutiny, though. The days of being a nobody out here are over, as much as she might like to toil in relative obscurity for a time while she finds her game. Among the press contingent at Wimbledon, there was much trying — and failing — to come up with a comparable example of someone who was so good one season and so miserable the next.
“You know, it’s definitely been a tough time. But if I stick with it, keep going, have the success I know I can have, I think it will be all that sweeter.”