Tennis: WTA-Finals: An unpredictable drama

On Sunday the WTA finals will start in Singapore (from 11 am LIVE on DAZN and in the LIVETICKER). Who has the best chance of succeeding the unqualified champion Dominika Cibulkova? Who’s more of an outsider? And to whom does the future belong? SPOX and Tennisnet have ventured into a Power Ranking and received support from DAZN expert Dieter Kindlmann.

“If you bet money on this World Cup, you can only lose,”Kindlmann says. Due to the power density of the participating players, the task of squeezing the favourites into a ranking is extremely complicated.

The 35-year-old boy from Sonthofen needs to know. After all, there are not many people who know as much about women’s tennis as the former professional, former hitting partner of Maria Sharapova and current coach of Madison Keys. Nevertheless, we took the risk.

Ostapenko wrote a true fairy tale at the French Open. The youngster from Latvia defeated Halep in the final and won her first Grand Slam title out of nothing as an unseeded player.

At the end of September, the woman from Riga still triumphed at the tournament in Seoul, but overall she seems to be lagging behind her form from Paris for months. Miracles are therefore not expected from her at the moment.

Dieter Kindlmann: Ostapenko is a player who owns the future. She got a bit under the radar and won the French Open surprisingly. I assume she’s not a one-hit wonder. Otherwise, however, she played a very mixed season. She is participating for the first time in a world championship and I am curious to see how she can cope with it mentally.

Svitolina won the titles at this year’s tournaments in Taipei, Dubai, Istanbul, Rome and Toronto. The right-handed woman, however, did not play a particularly important role in the mega events, the Grand Slam tournaments. Their best result was the quarter-finals at the French Open.

The Ukrainian woman is often shown her limits at the highest level. Svitolina was last defeated by Beijing’s Caroline Garcia in the quarter-finals. In Hong Kong, she was unable to compete in her second round match because of an injury to her right foot.

Dieter Kindlmann: Of the players who are in Singapore, she has won most of the tournaments this year. Svitolina is incredibly constant, comes extremely over her fighting spirit. It clearly lacks the weapons. At the big tournaments, it didn’t crack much this year as well. After all, Singapore is likely to be accommodating it because the surface is slow.

Wozniacki is once again constant this year, she was in a final seven times this season. However, the Danish player only managed to win a tournament in Tokyo in September in the last of these seven finals.

At the Grand Slams a big throw did not succeed again. Third round in Melbourne, quarter-finals in Paris and London, second round in New York – there was nothing more to it. Wozniacki is one of the most outsiders in Singapore, not least because of her recent problems with the elbow.

Dieter Kindlmann: She is an old hand at the World Cup and has a lot of experience. Unfortunately, she has not yet won a Grand Slam tournament in her career, which puts a strain on her. She’s of the type like Svitolina or Halep. She comes over the fighting spirit, makes hardly any mistakes. However, I do not think that your class will be enough to compete in the World Cup for victory.

Within two weeks, Garcia was crowned in Wuhan and Beijing, making her the last player to qualify for the World Cup. Among other things, she won against Halep and Svitolina. Clearly, the French woman is currently on fire.

If Garcia succeeds in keeping her ease of use at the WTA finals, she could even be a big surprise.

Dieter Kindlmann: She is currently something like my favourite child. I last commented on their matches in Beijing in the semi-finals and the final on DAZN and was very pleased. She brings with her physically and technically everything you need in tennis. Garcia has qualified for Singapore deservedly due to her strong performance. So far, no one has expected anything great from her, but this is of course different in a World Cup. You have to see how she copes with that pressure.

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