Iga Swiatek has admitted she is struggling to find positives as she suffered her worst result at Roland Garros for seven years.
The four-time champion failed to make the Roland Garros quarter-finals for only the second time in her career as she lost in straight sets to Marta Kostyuk.
After a tight first set, Swiatek committed a catalogue of unforced errors and easily lost the second set.
When analyzing the match Swiatek assessed her performance as ‘super tense’ and congratulated Kostyuk on the victory, “Yeah, for sure it wasn’t a good day in the office,” Swiatek claimed in her post-match press conference.
“Many things, you know, I could manage a bit better, but it was super tough for me today to keep the level that I wanted to. Obviously at this stage, you know, any opponent, like, in the fourth round, already played couple of matches, will use the opportunity. So congrats to Marta.
“Yeah, well, for sure I lost control of the match, and there was no way for me to, like, come back, because I felt worse and worse, you know. So this is not, like, positive, and this is different than losing to Elina in Rome or to Andreeva, I guess, in Stuttgart. So, yeah, it’s not great. I know that I lost because I was tense, and my body couldn’t really do what my body… the proper things, you know, but it’s not the first time, as well.
“So, yeah, just need to work on it. Honestly, like, for me, maybe the toughest loss is when you had the match in your hands, but I don’t know, you made stupid decisions and you let it go and your opponent suddenly comes back. It’s also bad when your tennis is just terrible, and you know that you were worse than the players that you play with.
“But I feel, like, for sure I lost today because Marta used the opportunity, and I was super tense. I feel like I can work on that, at least, and there is a reason, and there is maybe a solution. Maybe it’s not going to take one week or one month. Maybe it’s going to take even a season or something, but I need to believe that I can work through this and not be thrown off so quickly.”
One big area that cost Swiatek was her forehand as it was producing a number of unforced errors throughout the match.
Swiatek spoke about the technicalities of what went wrong with the forehand as she aims to find future solutions, “Well, I mean, we’re not on therapy session so I’m going to keep it simple, but obviously there could be many reasons,” Swiatek jokingly said to journalists.
“I’d rather, like, work on it on my own. It is harder a bit to handle stress for me in, like, last year, especially I feel like the peak was in U.S. this year. So I feel like today I felt off, you know, and I did mistakes that I didn’t want to do, and I wanted to play safe, but the ball flew everywhere. Suddenly these feelings came back, and I tried to, like, work on it with my dialogue inside, but it was tough today. Yeah, so it all kind of went drastically down, and I played worse and worse.
“I still don’t put the elbow how I exactly want to, so for sure, like, technically when we have more time to practice, I want to, like, repeat, repeat, repeat a hundred times, you know, to get it better. But, for sure, you know, I think the serve is the most complicated shot.
“So if something will fall apart a bit under pressure, I feel like it’s serve and then movement and then just mis-hitting everything. So, yeah, I guess that happened today.”
Despite the loss Swiatek produced an impressive first week and found some confidence but couldn’t translate that into the second week.
However, Swiatek found it difficult to find positives from heading out the tournament early as she now prepares for the grass court season, “There is no bonus from being out of the tournament,” Swiatek dismissively said in response to a journalists question.
“Well, for sure rest and then practice, but I’m not planning now. I don’t think even the team is planning yet, so we’ll see also. I have some obligations that I always do after the Roland Garros, and then probably I’ll go somewhere other than Poland to practice on grass, because it’s hard to practice on grass in Poland.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about grass at all. Hard to say. Yeah, it was a great year last year, but also, my previous results were not good, you know. I mean, they were good, but depending, you know, how you look at it.
“So I’m going to probably take it easy and try to be patient and be humble. Like, I don’t know how it’s going to be. I’m not a wizard.”
Swiatek will defend her Wimbledon title with the tournament at SW19 starting on the 29th of June.
