18-time Grand Slam champion Martina Navratilova has revealed the reasons behind former World No. 1 Maria Sharapova’s recent struggles on the court.
Writing for wtatennis.com, Navratilova claimed that the Russian diva, who made her controversial comeback from a 15-month doping ban in April 2017, has lost her confidence and lower-ranked opponents doesn’t feel intimated by her anymore.
Sharapova, a five-time Major winner, has failed to regain her form since making her return to action, winning only the Tianjin Open in October last year. Her performances at the Slams has been erratic to say the least, losing in the pre-quarterfinals of the US Open in September and the third round of the Australian Open in January.
Navratilova wrote: “The difficulty for Sharapova now is that the locker-room is collectively high on confidence when they play against her. It happens to everyone at some stage. In the past, when Serena Williams had a tough match, everyone else then thought: ‘Oh, maybe I now have a chance.’ That’s what Sharapova is going through now, with a pattern of losing early and kind of indirectly giving encouragement and confidence to future opponents. Once players drawn against her would have thought to themselves, ‘Oh damn, I’ve got Maria’, but now it’s quite the opposite as the players are saying to themselves, all thanks to this collective confidence, ‘Oh good, I’m playing Maria.’”
“Attitude is so much of tennis, and the rest of the field wants that prized scalp and they end up playing above their level. Previously, those players would have thought they could have perhaps won a set off Sharapova, and now they’re thinking they can win the match. And that makes it even trickier for Sharapova in the early rounds of a tournament to get her confidence back, and that can create a vicious circle.”
“Once you’ve lost your aura and attitude, it’s hard to get it back anyway and now it’s even harder as players are playing even better than they ought to. That makes it even more difficult winning those early rounds, getting that self-belief back and putting the lower ranked players in their place, so to speak.”
