Genie Bouchard is through the third round after a two hours and fifty-three minutes fight against Polona Hercog, winning 63 67 63
The crowd expected a fight between Eugenie Bouchard and Polona Hercog and that’s exactly what the two players gave to the fans sitting on the Grandstand at Flushing Meadows. The Canadian is having a terrible year after her breakthrough in 2014; she has not won two matches in a row since the Indian Wells tournament in March and half the points she gained in the whole year comes from the quarterfinal at the Australian Open in January. She’s still number twenty-five in the world, although she’s now 52 in the race and was heavily defeated last week in New Haven by Roberta Vinci (61 60). She is now working with Jimmy Connors in an attempt to regain her past status as the next big thing in WTA.
Hercog has had a better season than Bouchard, especially considering the different expectations levels, reaching the semifinal in Budapest and the quarters in Bad Gastein. She has defeated Zarina Dyas in straight sets in the first round and is trying to reach the third round a Grand Slam tournament for the second time in her career.
Hercog takes the lead in the first set going up 3-1 and playing a peculiar game for WTA standards, often slicing the backhand and playing a strong topspin forehand. She also hits a pretty consistent first serve and moves well around the court. Bouchard initially looks bothered by the her opponent’s style, in some ways similar to Vinci’s one that gave her nightmares last week, particularly when she is forced to respond to a sliced backhand two feet inside the court. She manages however to make some quick adjustments to her game and, after hitting 8 unforced errors in the first 5 games, she commits only four more in the next 5, winning all of them and conquering the first set six games to three.
The second set follows the exact same path as the first one: Hercog goes up three to one, only to be immediately reached at 3-all. From then on the two players manage to hold their serve only once in the set ending up to the breaker, where Hercog takes straight up the lead and holds it till the end, winning the tiebreak seven points to two.
The match now seems to be in Hercog’s favor. The stats from the second set show how Bouchard level dropped dramatically: 22 unforced errors to only 12 winners, and 47% of points won on serve. Eugenie, however, makes a strong start in the third set taking an early break and then consolidating the lead to 4-0. She hits more cleanly and accurately and, although she hands back a break, she looks determined to not let all of her advantage slip away, closing out the match after a deuce game and a long rally at 6-3, hitting eleven winners in the final set and coming to the net an astonishing number of times, 37 in the whole match, even though she was often forced to do so by the slices of her opponent.
Bouchard will now face Cibulkova in a match that will probably be hard fought and not easy to call. Anyway, the tournament has already been positive for the Canadian player who has managed to have back-to-back wins after five months and that, most importantly, has regained some of that confidence she lost during the year.
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