Translated by Giulia Bosatra
Before we get into this article, here’s a list of names:
Chris Evert
Martina Navratilova
Hana Mandlikova
Steffi Graf
Serena Williams
Maria Sharapova
Ashleigh Barty
What do they have in common? To date, these are the only female players who can boast winning at least one Slam title on clay, grass, and hard tennis courts – I hope I’ve got that right.
I remember hard court surfaces being introduced in the American Slam back in 1978; the Australian one followed suit in 1988. This probably prevented other major players of the early Open era (like Margaret Smith Court, Billie Jean King, or Evonne Goolagong) from being on this list. But since the court surface situation has stabilised, these statistics have become both reliable and relevant.
In any case, with her latest Australian success, Barty has managed to join this select group of elite athletes, winning on Paris’ clay (2019), on Wimbledon’s grass (2021), and Melbourne’s fast courts (2022).
Considering how she achieved her last Slam title, we’re forced to broaden our analysis to vaster and more ambitious horizons.
Her success in the Australian Open is one thing, but we really need to start considering her role in tennis history.
The numbers from her two weeks in Melbourne are unequivocal: Barty’s path to winning the title was straightforward and clear-cut.
Seven matches, fourteen sets won, none lost.
Since her return to the courts in 2022, she’s already won two tournaments (Adelaide and Australian Open), with a total of 10 matches won in two sets, and just the one match won in three sets (4-6, 7-5, 6-2 against Coco Gauff). Zero matches lost.
This is how her journey in Melbourne unrolled: 6-0 6-1 against Tsurenko, 6-1 6-1 against Bronzetti, 6-2 6-3 against Giorgi, 6-4 6-3 against Anisimova, 6-2 6-0 with Pegula, 6-1 6-3 with Keys, 6-3 7-6(2) with Collins.
Barty beat two Italian players and then no fewer than four American players in the last decisive rounds.
An interesting fact: she won against exactly the same number of American players at 2019’s Roland Garros (though the match sequence was Pegula, Collins, Keys, and Anisimova), plus a fifth one (Sofia Kenin).
These numbers are undeniable evidence of a superiority that her opponents were unable to confront, if not in sporadic parts of the set – and never consistently.
The last time we witnessed this level of dominance at an Australian Open was back in 2017: Serena Williams’ last endeavor before her maternity leave. She won 14 sets to zero and achieved her 23rd (and last, for now) Slam in her career.
Barty’s physical-technical characteristics
Barty’s superiority in 2022 is linked to her technical qualities and distinctive features.
Her serve: it isn’t given the credit it deserves, but it is exceptionally good. With such execution variety, Barty’s first serve has often helped her get out of tough break point situations and win points without rallying. Her serve will allow her to sail through a match with ease and margin over her opponent. Powerful, precise, and varied, it remains effective even when it’s executed with a slice or a kick. And there’s one thing that never ceases to surprise me: the ease in Barty’s direction-switch between her first and her second serve, and how it doesn’t impinge on her double-fault rates.
Her forehand, to which she’ll add just the right amount of topspin to secure a powerful shot and a safe trajectory over the net. At present, in my opinion, Barty’s forehand is quite simply the best one in the WTA Tour.
To these two ATP-level shots, Barty adds a one-handed backhand she usually plays with some backspin. It gives her opponents, who aren’t used to managing such low and fleeting parabolic ball trajectories, a very hard time.
Barty’s slice usually meets the receiver’s two-handed backhand when rallying on the left diagonal. And responding to a slice with a two-handed, topspin backhand, requires both great technique and a good deal of knee bending, to get the right swing into the shot. Basically, the physical effort and the mental resilience that is needed will take their toll on the match’s balance. Barty mainly uses this shot to maneuver her opponent’s position in the court – and not to score a direct point; her sliced backhand can actually be more incisive than her forehand, due to the number of unforced errors it generates from her opponent. The slice version of her backhand outshines her reliable topspin one – which is nowhere near as good as her forehand.
After all, Steffi Graf also had a similar shot selection (big forehand and slice backhand), and her results speak for themselves.
We can’t get the full picture of Barty’s technique by analyzing just these three shots. Her volley execution is also very good, and she’s equally capable of using solid drop-shots and several containment solutions to sustain long defence rallies without suffering.
In extreme situations, when some improvisation is needed, Barty will show off some unusual shots, like the on-the-fly forehand she hits from the baseline:
We’ve gone through her shot repertoire, but we’ve still not done her justice, Barty just has an extra something that goes beyond the mechanics of shot execution. This is how I’d define it: how naturally she plays her tennis. The command she shows in moving around the court is an example of how effortless tennis is to her. Barty looks at ease in any situation, thanks to the total control of her body movements in relation to the ball’s position. Coordination, immediate understanding of a situation, and the capability to quickly plan out the rally. Such rare qualities, which with Barty are very close to perfection.
Barty’s tactical characteristics
But at the end of the day, the gifts that I have been trying to describe here go beyond the purely physical-technical sphere and fuse into a whole which is inseparable from the tactical-strategic sphere. When Barty is on form not only does she make very few errors of execution, but she also seems to possess an infallible radar in the construction of the point.
If she finds herself facing a quality opponent, one who can bear comparison over several shots, then you’ll see a Barty that develops the exchange as it proceeds. Without forcing the individual execution, shot on shot she builds towards a situation which will enable her to close the point with a winning shot which is not in itself so very complicated. And this is because that last shot is merely the seal placed on a combination of shots that has propelled her opponent into a condition of increasing inferiority, before the “simple” concluding coup de grâce.
Often the sense of inevitability which accompanies the realization of the point is such that, at first glance, it might seem to lack drama: Barty’s tactical choices are so logically precise, so cleanly executed to seem, as I say, simple. Almost obvious. So much so that a spectator who is not all that familiar with tennis on seeing certain points might be forgiven for wondering: Seriously? Is that all it takes to unsettle the best players in the world?
Yes, that really is “all” it takes, if you want to make a superficial assessment. Because the fact of the matter is if we embark on an analysis of each individual shot, we discover that every single one of them is executed with perfect timing, at the best possible angle, with just the right amount of spin, the best depth, taking us on to that so “obviously” winning conclusion.
Another reason why each of these individual shots is “better” is that they often don’t even need to be placed half a centimetre from the line, because the “best” shot will also allow for a certain safety margin, and this is what distinguishes it from a super-spectacular winning shot devised at the last minute to reverse a desperate situation. But above all, each of these individual shots is the best because it’s part of a chain of shots which are perfectly balanced and developed.
If we bear in mind this particular characteristic of Barty’s, maybe we can begin to see the whole WTA tennis picture with a different eye. Basically, Barty doesn’t win simply because she has a deadly backhand slice or on account of what is – given her stature – a very impressive serve. And she doesn’t win just because she has a stellar forehand. She wins because in addition to all this she has an absolute talent for construction of the game. A degree of talent that, if not fully understood, may well prove counterproductive when it comes to an assessment of court performance: both of her own performance and that of her opponent’s. And let’s not forget that the opponents are not all the same or lacking in tactical intelligence themselves.
And to those tennis fans who turn up their noses at Barty I’d just like to say this:
don’t wait for Barty to retire from the game to discover that you miss that natural instinct of hers for tennis seen as development of the rally. Because at such a high level as this, we’re talking about a simply extraordinary gift, even if maybe less obvious and less sensational than other elements of tennis.
All perfect, then? Well, if I really wanted to nitpick about her tactical qualities, I might say this: maybe on occasion Barty’s construction of the point tends to proceed with little regard for the characteristics of the player she has in front of her. Maybe in certain situations, she would be better off carrying on working, or attacking the weak side of her opponent, even when the tennis manual, dealing with that situation in the abstract, would dictate that she should vary things and move over to her other side.
But naturally there’s no reason to assume this sensation of mine is right; and at any rate it’s never easy for a player to find the perfect balance between two aims that can diverge: on the one hand the desire to give full rein to one’s own characteristics, on the other trying to bring out the worst play in one’s opponent.
Barty’s mental characteristics
If we reflect on her performance in recent seasons, that is since she became the world’s number one, I would say that her weakness lies in her mental and competitive characteristics. Perhaps because she is such a naturally good player of tennis that in order for her to give full expression to her abilities she doesn’t actually need to add the spice of struggle to the match. She certainly isn’t a hypercompetitive player like, for example, Angelique Kerber or, staying with the more current Australian matches: Danielle Collins.
On the contrary, most of Barty’s recent defeats were caused by sudden mental black-outs that led to such a drastic decline in her play to seem virtually inexplicable.
On a small scale, we saw this in the last Australian Open as well. Let’s run through all seven of the rounds she faced. In every match in the first set, when the game had not yet fully taken off, Barty approached perfection: not only did she win all of these sets but not once, that’s right, never, did she lose her serve. The odd sign of flagging did, however, surface during the second set of some of the matches when the classic extra-technical factors that characterize a profoundly mental game like tennis came into play.
Barty lost her serve for the first time (in the whole tournament) at the opening of the second set against Anisimova, and twice in the second set of the final against Collins, when, that is, she was a mere step away from winning the title. The situation was similar in both matches: facing her was an adversary at a disadvantage, with less and less to lose, and therefore strengthened by the courage of she who needs to call on every resource to avoid elimination. In Barty, on the other hand, we witnessed the classic faltering of she whose play is affected at glimpsing a final within her grasp, the typical tightening up.
On that occasion in the final against Collins, trailing by 1-5 the set seemed at that point to be compromised. But instead of giving it up for lost and concentrating on the third set, Barty attempted nonetheless to even things up. And she did so winning four games in a row, bringing the score to 5-5. After which she stretched things out to a tie-break, which she promptly took with an unequivocal 7-2 (final score 6-3, 7-6).
In short, a few cracks in her mental state could be detected in that last victory. Last year, however, Barty was not always able to cut short the negative moments that occurred when the match was seemingly in her hands. In particular in the two hard-court Slams of 2021. Both at the Australian Open against Muchova and at the US Open against Rogers she met defeat in a similar way – brought on by a sudden drop in performance just when the job seemed done.
In Melbourne all it took was the Medical Time Out requested by Muchova to overturn the situation leading to the final 1-6, 6-3, 6-2. In New York it was Rogers’ change in tactics (which took the form of defensive moonballs) when Barty was leading 2-6, 6-1, 5-2 that set Barty’s arm into an irremediable tremble till the decisive tiebreak defeat.
Despite these fruitless interludes, last year Barty won Wimbledon and four other important tournaments (Yarra Valley Classic, Miami, Stuttgart, Cincinnati). And taking stock, we mustn’t forget that out of the eight season’s defeats two were down to her pulling out due to arm problems: in Rome against Gauff and at the Roland Garros against Linette.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written before Barty announced her retirement
