DREAM IS OVER
Eugenie Bouchard’s magical run in Australia ends in straight-set loss to Chinese veteran Li Na in semifinal.
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — It wasn’t that Quebec’s Eugenie Bouchard played poorly.
It was just that her opponent didn’t let her play.
The 19-year-old dream run at the Australian Open ended Thursday afternoon when she was beaten 6-2, 6-4 by Li Na of China, an experienced competitor 13 years her senior who simply had too much firepower.
Li, a singles finalist here a year ago, will be there again. In the process, she did to Bouchard what native of Westmount so often did to her opponents in her first five matches of the tournament.
She dictated play, pushed Bouchard around and forced her to defend, when her strength is to dictate herself.
She punished Bouchard’s second serve in a way no opponent had before. She changed the direction of the ball and aimed for the sidelines as none of Bouchard’s previous victims had.
Li had some poor patches, which allowed Bouchard to get herself back into the match a few times and certainly gave her — and the Genie Army, faithfully at its post once again — some hope.
But as quickly as she disappeared for a few moments, Li returned. And she left Bouchard flailing and stretching for powerful shots the likes of which she hadn’t seen over the last week and a half.
Ultimately, the match was not in Bouchard’s hands, which had to be a helpless feeling even if the teenager remained relatively composed throughout.
Unlike Ana Ivanovic, Bouchard’s quarter-final opponent whose backhand side is considerably weaker than her forehand, Li has no such weakness to attack. She’s equally effective — and powerful — from both sides.
All Bouchard could hope for was a drop in her opponent’s form prolonged enough to not only allow her to create a bit of a lead, but perhaps also create doubt in Li’s mind.
It really never happened. Bouchard did break Li’s serve to lead 2-0 in the second — really, Li broke herself with a double-fault. But that was as close as she came to making a move.
Despite the outcome, Bouchard’s life and her profile in Canada and around the tennis world are forever changed.
A year ago, she was thought of as a potential star of tomorrow. When, exactly, that tomorrow would arrive was the big question.
Then 18, her WTA Tour ranking stood at No. 145. She lost in the second round of the qualifying event here.
Twelve short months later, having come into the tournament ranked No. 31 and a seeded player for the first time at a Grand Slam tournament, she will leave Australia ranked in the Top 20, her profile significantly raised.
It hasn’t hurt her bank account, either. Bouchard earned nearly $550,000 between singles and doubles at this tournament — more than she had earned in her entire professional career to this point.
Bouchard was asked after her victory over Ivanovic on Tuesday whether she had to pinch herself to believe it was all happening.
For most teenagers, it probably would be a fair question. For Bouchard, it’s just not in the mindset.
“No. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was 5 years old and working my whole life for and sacrificing a lot of things for. So it’s not exactly a surprise. I always expect myself to do well,” she said.
Contrast that statement with the words of Romanian Simona Halep, who had a quarter-final match Wed- nesday against a less-accomplished opponent than Ivanovic, No. 20 seed Dominika Cibulkova of Slovakia, and crumbled completely in a 6-3, 6-0 defeat.
“I had emotions, big emotions, and I couldn’t manage this,” Halep said.
Bouchard has yet to win a WTA Tour event or even make a final; Halep, a 22-yearold currently ranked No. 11 in the world, won six lower-level WTA Tour events in 2013.
There was no need for Bouchard to pinch herself Thursday; she got a bit of a reality check in terms of how the top players in the world go about their business in the final days of a major tournament.
If it all seemed so easy through the first 10 days, Thursday’s semifinal was a reality check that will tell both Bouchard and her fans what the player herself already knows: she’s on her way, but a lot of hard work still remains.