Wedding days to French clay for Williams
BY next Saturday the plumage and dress sported so elegantly by Serena Williams at the royal wedding will have long been put in a closet, and the matching pink shoes replaced by claycovered sneakers.
It will be the day before the French Open starts, and the great champion will be preparing to tackle whatever this Thursday’s draw has thrown at her in her unseeded position.
That, at least, is the plan, assuming that everything goes well once she returns from her brief trip to the UK to fine tune herself for what can be described as her proper comeback to the tour.
Williams will not find the landscape much changed, but while she was busy yesterday, her forthcoming rivals were battling it out for a place in the final of the Italian Open. This afternoon world No 4 Elina Svitolina will take on Simona Halep to battle for the main pre-Roland Garros title.
Following the birth of her first child on September 1, Williams tried to rush back to play at Indian Wells and Miami in March but was clearly not ready.
In an interview this week her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, was quite explicit about that, and few would argue. More surprising was his firm assertion that, having skipped Rome and Madrid, his player would be present in Paris. Mouratoglou is French, and it is hard to imagine he wants to build up false expectations.
Clay is Williams’s least natural surface, and it is the most physically demanding. With her current ranking a nominal 454 she will be at the draw’s mercy, as while she has a protected ranking to enter the tournament that does not apply to her seeding.
So it is an ambitious comeback plan, the prospect of a potential seven matches in a fortnight for a rusty 36-year-old, even though she arrived at Mouratoglou’s academy in Nice at the start of May to begin preparations.
It looks a long shot that she can win in Paris but there may be two elements in play here. The first is that she wants to make a statement that she still fears no-one, and the second is that there is nothing like a prolonged spell on the clay to build up fitness.
The reality is that Williams is probably looking more medium term, to a place 20 miles from where she was yesterday in Windsor. She will want to make sure that when she arrives at the All England Club she is ready to mount a challenge for an eighth title at Wimbledon. Sixteen months on from her last Grand Slam, the American will find that nobody has really stepped up to assert themselves as indisputably the best player in the world. The present No 1, Halep, has yet to win a major, for example. Those who have triumphed in her absence have not dramatically pushed on. Following the pattern of first-time female winners, Australian Open champion Caroline Wozniacki is title-less since Melbourne. Garbine Muguruza and Sloane Stephens remain totally unpredictable, while Jelena Ostapenko still looks a work in progress. Maria Sharapova, who lost to Halep in yesterday’s semifinal, is perhaps the most interesting challenger of all, rediscovering long-lost form at the most opportune time after reverting to her old coach, Thomas Hogstedt.
She does not seem in the mood to further stoke her feud with Williams but a match-up between the two is one everyone would love to see.
In full public relations mode the icy Russian even went as far this week to support the American’s call that there should be seeding protection for those coming back from giving birth (even Wozniacki, one of Williams’s best friends by contrast, is ambivalent about this.)
‘I would like to see that change. I think that would be nice,’ she said. ‘I think it’s such an incredible effort for a woman to come back, physically/emotionally to come back on tour, having a child. I think it’s just another whole dimension to the travel, to the experiences, to the emotions, to the physicality of every single day.
‘Tennis is such a selfish sport. But I think when there’s a child in your life you lose a little bit of that because there’s something that’s so much more important.’