Maybe it was the snowfall that on Wednesday night whitened the San Jacinto Mountains around Indian Wells making the landscape a bit less desert-like and a bit more tundra-like, or maybe it was just Daria Kasatkina’s natural coming-of-age, but the first BNP Paribas Open women’s quarterfinal on Thursday morning was one-way traffic in favor of the 20-year-old Russian from Togliattigrad. Too many errors from Kerber, too erratic her game to counter Dasha’s crafty game working like clockwork on the high-bouncing Stadium 1 Plexipave.
Temperature was still chilly after the nightly rains, so the colder air was not allowing balls to whistle through the air like they normally do in the desert, but Kasatkina’s consistence from the baseline was forcing the former no.1 in the world to go for too much with her groundstrokes, inevitably leading to way too many unforced errors.
“The weather was on point, my kick was on point, everything was well today – said an ear-to-ear smiling Kasatkina after the match – I am pretty happy with my game, it wasn’t like cruising, but I was doing the right things to win. I have been practicing hard to do what I did on court today, and to stay really calm, so I am not surprised I was able to play so well”.
The Russian who “outsmarted” Australian Open champion Caroline Wozniacki in the 4th Round went from strength to strength as the match progressed and sent a distraught Angelique Kerber packing in just 57 minutes with the loss of only two games. “It’s difficult for me to play against her – said the 2-time Grand Slam champion – I couldn’t find my rhythm, I made a lot of mistakes, and the conditions were tricky. It was the first match of the days, and during warm-up the court was wet. In the end, it just wasn’t my day”.
The second quarterfinal between Venus Williams and Carla Suarez Navarro wasn’t much more contested: Venus’ powerful groundstrokes were just too much too handle for a flustered Carla, whose wonderful one-handed top spin backhand is not as effective on hard courts as it is on clay. The beginning of the second set, after an easy 6-3 for the American in the first, was the only moment of the match when the afternoon crowd at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden had the illusion of a close match: Williams stumbled onto two avoidable unforced error when serving at 1-0 to concede the break back to the Spaniard. But Suarez Navarro did not take that opportunity to move ahead in the score and was broken again with a fatal double fault.
The sixth game saw the last twist in the match with Venus coming back from 0-40 for a 4-2 lead that turned into a final 6-2 a few minutes later. “I’ve been playing well for a while, since before this tournament – said Venus during her press conference I haven’t been doing much in the Coachella Valley except coming to and from the tennis. That’s a good problem because it means you’re winning matches. I don’t want to be too much of a tourist here because it means you’ve lost”.
Results:
[20] D. Kasatkina b. [10] A. Kerber 6-0 6-2
[8] V. Williams b. [27] C. Suarez Navarro 6-3 6-2
