The Sports-India Community

PKBasu wrote: ↑Sun Jun 26, 2005 4:58 am I had the distinct pleasure of watching Sania Mirza take her and Simon Aspelin into the second round yesterday. (I was over-optimistic when I told Jay I was 10 minutes away from getting in; it took nearly another hour -- for a total of two hours in the queue, all because of Andy Murray, but it was worth it in the end). When the final moment of entry into the hallowed grounds occurred, the scoreboard showed 1-2 in the final set. It was still on serve, and the first game I watched (or perhaps the second) had a loooong sequence of deuces on Sania's serve. Court no. 4 was 95% surrounded by Indians, but you wouldn't know that from listening to the sounds. They just politely clapped after every point, it seemed. I changed that in a hurry. In the first couple of games, it seemed our pair was under much more pressure, and it seemed only a matter of time before they would lose.
But a little bit of serious cheering between points (encouragement for the good shots, in particular) can lift a player/team. My throat was in action from the second point I saw (to the detriment of my vocal chords and my daughter's ears...). A mix of humour and sheer loudness soon had the crowd galvanised; Sania seemed a tad embarrassed at first, but I think (in retrospect) that her game began to flow as a result of the encouragement.
And she is even better in real life than the impressive player I saw on TV against Kuznetsova. The power in her groundstrokes matched and usually surpassed both the men on the court, and hitting the ball to her was never the best policy for her opponents. The power and accuracy of Sania's groundstrokes keeps getting better almost every month these days. Etlis was easily the craftiest person on court, mixing in the volleys, drop shots and delicate touch that makes great doubles players. Our pair generally stayed back, although Aspelin occasionally showed good volleying ability too. Sania's volley is not yet a strength, but she didn't miss many; the difference between her volleys and her groundstrokes from the baseline is that the volley is still basically a defensive shot (or an occasional deftly placed shot) which she caresses rather than pummels. Once she starts doing the latter, she will be unstoppable. Her return of serves were excellent throughout naturally, although Etlis had little difficulty holding his serve (too much variety and placement, although Sania had one breathtaking return against him that cost him a point on serve). There was one particularly memorable rally that went for about 15 shots between Sania and Etlis, where the former's power almost got the better of Etlis's craft and strokeplay, until he hit one to Aspelin and the latter volleyed into the net (to the audible disappointment of the crowd; soon after, I got the crowd to chant HIS name when he came up with a good shot, and his smile was noticeable!). Aspelin's serve came under severe pressure at 4-5 (we were down 15-40), but some absolutely brilliant, occasionally breathtaking play from Sania (and one or two nice volleys and overheads from Aspelin) got us back even, and pumped up. Sania immediately put Lisa McShea's serve under pressure, and we soon had a couple of breakpoints (15-40) after some magnificent returns from Sania (that were too strong even for Etlis!). IIRC, we broke on the next point. And Sania held serve with consummate ease to end the match in style (when serving in doubles, it's always nice to have a partner who can put away the volley on the third point, and Simon did that twice in that final game to make things easy). It was wonderful to see Sania win her second match at Wimbledon, but I have a message for the Indians in the crowd: don't just stand around and give "silent" encouragement (she probably can't see that most people in the crowd are Indians); use your throats to cheer your player on, it always works!! (How I wish I had been on centre court during the Kuznetsova match rather than watching on a TV in faraway Amsterdam!).

Atithee wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 5:05 pm While we can’t have Sania back yet, it’s good to have PKB back.