Konta’s alarming slump
Johanna Konta is struggling to “stop the rot”, said Mike Dickson in the Daily Mail. Earlier this year, she became the first British woman to make the Wimbledon semifinals in almost 40 years. But since reaching the quarter-finals of the Cincinnati Open, in August, her form “has gone sharply downhill”.
She was knocked out of the US Open in the first round; and on Sunday, in the China Open, she suffered her fifth loss in a row. In her contest against Monica Niculescu, who is ranked a mere No. 65 in the world, Konta resembled a “novice”. After two years of “near-constant improvement”, the 26-year-old has suffered her worst run since 2009 – when she was a “virtual unknown”. Konta’s slump is all the more surprising because she is floundering on hard courts, her favourite surface, said Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. But she has been “showing some of her old brittleness” – the debilitating nerves that held her back for so long. Having worked with a mind coach, she learned to cope with pressure, and she had seemed unassailable when she won the Miami Open last April.
Thanks to her achievements earlier this year, Konta still remains world No. 7, said Dickson – putting her in a strong position to make the “prestigious” year-end WTA Finals, for the eight best performers of the season. But she is “unrecognisable” from the player who stormed up the rankings over the last two years.