Garbine Muguruza’s coach, Sam Sumyk has recently emphasised the need for Muguruza to ‘suffer’ in order to be successful, so is that 100% accurate?
The Spaniard crashed out of Roland Garros with a 6-1 6-4 defeat to Simona Halep, in a match where Muguruza suffered and didn’t take her opportunities. The 2016 champion has had a rollercoaster past 12 months with her French coach, Sam Sumyk.
They have experienced very bizarre on-court coaching timeouts with the Spaniard not exactly agreeing with Sumyk. The uncomfortable coaching relationship has been bizarre with the 24 year old even turning down Conchita Martinez in favour of the Frenchman, which from an outside perspective doesn’t seem to make much sense.
‘Learning To Suffer’
In a recent interview with the New York Times the Frenchman has revealed his philosophy in how to coach the inconsistent grand slam champion and it’s a surprising one, “When she’s suffering inside, I know it’s good,” explained Sumyk. “I know it sounds weird, but yeah — suffering is not a negative thing. I know when she’s very demanding with herself and it’s never good enough, then it’s good.”
Later in the interview he also admitted what many fans of Muguruza’s fear the most and that is she may burn out too early. It is a philosophy that has worked for Muguruza in the early part of her relationship with Sumyk as she started her defensive style of play. However is it a philosophy that will continue to work? The answer is clearly no. Sure, any athlete needs to learn how to mentally suffer as that is part of sport, you have to lose at some point.
However the Spaniard cannot keep physically suffering with her defensive game style as it simply doesn’t work. The facts are that a more aggressive game style and mind-set means that Muguruza will become an even bigger threat and as Sumyk eluded to, it won’t burn her out.
Learning to suffer physically for Muguruza means that she won’t be as successful at slams as today proved when she got outclassed for the a set and a half against Simona Halep. The facts are that when Muguruza adopts an aggressive game style, mostly under Conchita Martinez, she succeeds in a big way, just look at Wimbledon last year and Doha this year.
The next few months will be interesting to see if the Spaniard can keep learning to suffer or if her inconsistency will be more extreme to an extent that suffering will no longer be good enough to beat the top players. This philosophy can also weaken her forehand in the big matches such as today’s match against Halep and the match against Kvitova at the US Open last year.
However it seems as Muguruza is keen to stay with Sumyk and as Wimbledon approaches she looks to take the positives into the grass court season as she would love nothing more than to successfully defend a grand slam title for the first time in her career.