Andreescu rediscovers love for game
It has been almost exactly a year since Bianca Andreescu lost her game. She made the 2021 quarter-finals in Strasbourg, which was her first tournament after an impressive run to the final at the Miami Open last spring.
But then, the wilderness. Four losses in her next five matches, including first-round exits at the French Open and Wimbledon. By late summer, she was starting to question her place in tennis, just two years removed from her remarkable rise through the sport.
“I felt I did not enjoy the game as much as I did before. I didn’t feel the same passion,” she said this week. “Last year was, like, super up and down. I didn’t understand why I was getting upset at myself for feeling that way, as well. Just this constant battle with myself. Obviously other little things.”
After a loss at Indian Wells last fall, she decided she needed a break. It would last six months. In her return to competitive tennis last month, the 21-year-old Canadian said she had rediscovered the joy that she found in tennis as a kid. She didn’t want to be defined by wins or losses, she said, but just wanted to play and enjoy the sport again.
Three tournaments later, she seems to have rediscovered her game, too.
Andreescu rolled into the quarter-finals of the Italian Open with a 6-4, 6-4 win over Croatia’s Petra Martic on Thursday afternoon, her third consecutive straight-sets win in Rome. Even though she is relatively inexperienced on clay, she has looked much like her old self, playing aggressive, powerful tennis while mixing in a variety of shots to keep opponents off balance. Most notably, Andreescu has played the pressure points well, a hallmark of her meteoric 2019 year. Level in the second set against Martic on Thursday, during which Andreescu fought off a couple of break points that would have swung the momentum in the Croatian’s favour. She sent projectiles of first serves that gave her the chance to control the point. A few games later, the match was over.
It was the best evidence that the young Canadian is ready for a sustained return to action. She had two impressive wins in the previous tourney in Madrid before falling to American Jessica Pegula in the third round.
“It was, like, super up and down, but that was a great reality check from the universe,” she said this week. “I’m very pleased with how I regrouped from that. Last year, I would have cried in my pillow for two days straight. Now, I just feel more hungry and motivated to continue and to be better.”
This kind of honesty and vulnerability is bracing from someone who by all appearances had the sport in her grasp when she blasted her way up to fourth in the WTA rankings at just 19 years of age. At the U.S. Open in 2019, she played with an evident swagger on the way to the first Grand Slam singles win by a Canadian, but she was also soaking it all in. She gasped in a post-match press conference when she discovered that she had broken into the Top 10 rankings, and she spoke with the enthusiasm of a teenager about looking for giant rats in the New York subway system. When she beat Serena Williams in front of a raucous Arthur Ashe stadium crowd, with undeniable Russell-crowe-ingladiator vibes, it was not hard to imagine her being the topranked player in the world by the following summer.