This is day 2 of my visit to Roland Garros and I managed to see the whole match of Polona Hercog of Slovenia and Aravane Rezai of France.

Polona used different spins, slices, speeds and heights to disturb the rhythm of Aravane Rezai in the first set but then Rezai got used to this game and simply overpowered Polona.

Polona has a some great weapons; her kick serve is very effective on clay, her forehand is versatile, controlled and quite fast, and she is one of the few girls on the tour that plays backhand slice really well.

Her top spin backhand is not that good for this level of tennis and it will be exploited over and over again if she plays top 50 WTA players. (more…)

This is day 1 of my tennis blogging from Roland Garros and it wasn’t a nice welcome. When I arrived to Paris at around 11 am, it was raining and was quite cold.

The rain stopped later but the wind kept blowing and it was quite a difficult day to play tennis.

Many players were struggling with conditions and most of them knew what they had to do in the wind; play high percentage tennis, don’t go for the lines and work for every point.

If the player had the wind in the back, he or she mostly just kept good deep shots in play and the opponent sooner or later played a short ball – against the wind.

Then it was only the matter of not overhitting the short ball. (more…)