by
Matt Zemek
Cincinnati is one of the more disjointed and attritional tournaments on either tennis tour. The fact that it comes in the second half of the tennis season, the week after a challenging tournament in Canada, offers considerable reinforcement of that claim. The added details of recent years have only made this tournament even more physically and mentally demanding. In 2016, the Rio Olympics had been sandwiched between Canada and Cincinnati, making it very hard for a lot of pros who had gone to Brazil to then fly to Ohio and compete. Last year and this year, rain caused multiple participants to play multiple matches on the same day. These were not normal situations with normal conditions.
The question had to be asked after the 2016 and 2017 Cincinnati WTA tournaments, and it has to be asked now in 2018: Will Cincinnati results carry over to the U.S. Open? Will they be indicators or aberrations?
In 2016, the tournament was an indicator: Karolina Pliskova beat Angelique Kerber in the Cincinnati final. The two met 20 days later in the U.S. Open final, with Kerber pulling out a riveting three-set victory. In 2017, the needle moved in the direction of aberration. Of the eight Cincinnati quarterfinalists last year, only two — Pliskova and Sloane Stephens — made the U.S. Open quarterfinals. Only one, Stephens, made the semifinals or better.
Now we arrive at 2018. More rain, more double matches in the same day, more weary players. Petra Kvitova was tired and worn out in the searing hot sun on Saturday in the semifinals against Kiki Bertens. Simona Halep was able to play four full matches to make the final and then two full sets in the final, but she didn’t have a third set in her after playing two extended weeks of hardcourt tennis in North America. Kiki Bertens played legitimately strong tennis to win the championship in Ohio, but she was also the fittest player in the field while others battled combinations of fatigue (Stephens) and injury (a heavily-bandaged Elise Mertens).
Will Cincinnati be a positive indicator for the U.S. Open? Keep in mind that Elina Svitolina’s Rome championships before the French Open have not been indicators at Roland Garros. Kvitova’s titles in grass warm-up events have not carried over to Wimbledon. Caroline Wozniacki’s Eastbourne win this year did not mean much at Wimbledon. One could make the argument that a full week of tennis hurt her Wimbledon prospects.
Where does this leave us before the U.S. Open? Everyone will be wondering if Bertens can carry her dramatic rise into and through New York, but there isn’t any precedent for her in the Big Apple. Defending champion Sloane Stephens didn’t last long in Cincinnati, but her run in Montreal reaffirmed her status as a leading contender, so she doesn’t fall under the banner of “a Cincinnati test case” in Flushing Meadows. Kvitova has never made a U.S. Open semifinal, regardless of Cincinnati results. What she does in New York exists on its own terms.
No, the best test case of Cincinnati is the woman who came one point from winning it and becoming the first woman to win the Canada-Cincinnati double since 1973: Simona Halep.
The Romanian carried her Cincy performances to New York in 2015 and 2016. In 2015, she made the Cincinnati final and the U.S. Open semifinals. In 2016, she made the Cincy semis and the U.S. Open quarters. Her Open quarterfinal loss to Serena Williams was a high-level match played with the polish and ferocity of a final. In 2017, the road took a turn, but not in a normal way. Halep made the Cincinnati final again, only to lose in the first round at the U.S. Open. The twist, though, was that Halep drew an unseeded Maria Sharapova in round one, and Sharapova proceeded to play a terrific match, aided by ample rest which Halep — in marked contrast — did not have.
This piece is being written before the U.S. Open draw, so we don’t know what surprises might await Halep, but let’s say for the sake of argument that there are no unusually bad draws (Serena Williams before the quarterfinals) for Simona. If she doesn’t receive unusually awful luck with her path through the bracket, this year will enable her to say that last year was a rare bolt of lightning.
If, on the other hand, Halep gets a manageable draw and still stubs her toe — as she did against Hsieh Su-Wei at Wimbledon — she will leave New York with a bitter taste, and her Cincinnati foray, in which she overcame fatigue to nearly win the tournament, will be forgotten for how impressive it was.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, it is said. What happens in Cincinnati might stay there, or it might travel to New York. Simona Halep is certainly hoping for the latter answer, and she will soon get the chance to speak with her racquet at the USTA National Tennis Center.
Tennis with an Accent 