RUNNING DOWN A DREAM
Halep, Stephens willing to run down every shot on way to Slam win
U.S. Open champ Sloane Stephens isn’t about to let a point get away from her at Roland Garros. But neither is No. 1 Simona Halep as she chases her first Grand Slam title,
Sloane Stephens enters Saturday’s French Open final against No.1 Simona Halep with a 6-0 record in tournament title matches.
“I’m pretty calm on the court all the time, I’d say. I don’t get too up, too down,” Stephens said. “I think that it has helped me.”
Halep, meanwhile, is 0-3 with a Grand Slam trophy at stake.
“Hopefully,” Halep said, “(Saturday) I will be better than previous ones.”
Here’s something the women who meet for the championship at Roland Garros do have in common: They rarely seem to let a point end quickly. Halep, a 26-year-old Romanian, and the 10th-seeded Stephens, a 25year-old American, are among the best there is right now at using instinct and speed to track down tough-to-reach shots and force opponents to hit another.
And that’s not to say they’re merely content to push balls back. Both have learned to pick the right spots to be aggressive and are quite capable of switching from retriever to attacker in a blink.
“They obviously both move really well. It’s going to be who can stay in the point the longest,” said Madison Keys, who lost to Stephens in the French Open semifinals Thursday and in the U.S. Open final last September.
“Both of them are similar in the sense that if you can get them off of the baseline, then you can open up the court.”
Neither finalist seems willing to concede she’s out of a point. Or a match.
Stephens was two points from defeat in the third round against Camila Giorgi of Italy, before coming back to win 8-6 in the third set. Halep began as poorly as could be, falling into a 5-0 hole in the first set of her first-round match against Alison Riske of the U.S., before coming back to win.
Halep dropped the opening set of her quarterfinal against two-time major champion Angelique Kerber. But Halep turned that one around, too, and pointed her right index finger at her temple afterward, as if to let the world know what allowed her to win that day.
“She deals much better with pressure. The fact that she be- came No. 1 has given her a different dimension, a different stature. She really deals with things better,” said 1978 French Open champion Virginia Ruzici, Halep’s manager and the only woman from Romania to collect a major title.
Hale is 5-2 against Stephens, winning their past four matches. But Stephens has grown as a player thanks to two particularly trying stretches.
One was an 11-month absence with a foot injury, the other was an eight-match losing streak that followed her first major trophy at last year’s U.S. Open.
“I have matured a little bit and have recognized the opportunities when they have been presented,” Stephens said. “I think the most important thing is that I have taken those opportunities and done a lot with them.”