Will Maria ever be back on top of the world again?
Beset by injury and having split from her coach, Sharapova has a mountain to climb
CRACKLING with animosity, tension and no little quality, it was a contender for match of the year when Maria Sharapova and Eugenie Bouchard faced off at the 2017 Madrid Open.
In a reminder that edgy competition remains tennis’s most underexploited resource, two players with a mutual loathing fought each other to a standstill before the Canadian just managed to breast the tape in a deciding set.
You might not have thought that, nearly a year on, the two protagonists in such an outstanding contest would be approaching the meatiest part of the following season beset by doubt.
Bouchard is now ranked 114, without an agent and her stay at the Miami Open lasted until the second qualifying round before she was humbled by little-known Swede Rebecca Peterson.
Sharapova is without a coach and did not make the starting line at all. She has been felled by another of the injuries which have blighted her comeback and was this week provoked into an explanation for her latest absence by a complaint from one of her millions of social media followers.
While few tears will be shed for either of them in the locker room, their struggles are a blow to the tour. The combination of ability, hauteur and looks mean they polarise and engage the public like few others. But as Serena Williams has been reminded in the last two weeks, comebacks from lengthy absences are rarely straightforward.
In Sharapova’s case, the reality is that, with a ranking of 42, she has still needed a wildcard to enter next month’s Stuttgart Grand Prix, where she returned last April after a 15-month doping ban. When she reached the semi-finals she would hardly have envisaged that, a year on, she would still require the kind of special invitation that caused such controversy back then. Not only did her competitive instinct look intact, her serve appeared to have improved due to the work done on it with coach Sven Groeneveld, who stood by her and remained on the payroll through the hiatus in her career.
Now Groeneveld has gone, after what both described as a mutual parting this month, so too have the apparent improvements in her serve. A problem area of her game since shoulder surgery, it has looked less reliable this season than last. A 5-4 record in 2018 has been accompanied by 53 double faults. Initially, Sharapova’s absence from Miami was explained with the blandest of quotes, unremarkable except for a spelling mistake.
Amid social media murmurings speculating over the withdrawal, one fan moaned to her about the disappointment of having bought two tickets to see her play.
Sharapova, not known for her candour on such matters, shed light on the ‘recurring pain’ she has been suffering from and other health issues.
‘Besides numbing my left forearm 30 minutes before my first-round match in Indian Wells in order to get through the match without any recurring pain that I’ve had in past months, I also found out that I had an air pocket in my lung from which I wasn’t allowed to fly for three weeks from first findings until it healed,’ she wrote.
‘So if the thought process is that I enjoy going through MRI, CT scans, injections, the five different doctor specialists I’ve seen this past month and signing a withdrawal from one of my favourite tournaments, then I can honestly tell you that this time you’re incorrect.’
These are not the first significant physical problems she has had
since coming back and was out from mid-May last year until July with a leg injury. And, of course, she is no longer able to draw on copious amounts of meldonium to help her out. Approaching 31, can she reach the top again without the now banned medication she took for so long?
In the 12 tournaments she has managed since returning, her record is 21-10, compared with 35-11 in the dozen prior to the ban, which were achieved in a broadly more competitive set of events.
You can only wonder how long she would wish to continue as less than the superstar she was and there is sure to be concern about how much being a middle ranking player will damage her carefully nurtured brand. Apart from the awkward questions surrounding the m-word, there is only so long before relative mediocrity further taints Sharapova Inc.
Bouchard has clearly not had the same career but is already learning this law of commercial erosion the hard way.
About the only thing that has gone in her favour this year was the judgment in her long-running lawsuit against the United States Tennis Association. That related to an incident in 2015 at the US Open, where she slipped over in the locker room on a slick floor surface and banged her head. The award was not disclosed but is widely accepted as having been into seven figures.
There has been a price to pay, however, in the business appearing to have been a distraction; she has not come close to replicating 2014, in which she reached the Wimbledon final.
At 24, however, Bouchard still has time on her side. Sharapova, with her history of injuries, has the tide against her if she is to reestablish herself in the top ten.
The whole game would love to see Sharapova face off again versus Bouchard or Serena Williams, even with their rankings of 42, 114 and 491. The question is, however, will it ever happen?