With her tournament victory in Sydney, Angelique Kerber has finally cemented her favourites status for the first Grand Slam tournament in 2018.
Angelique Kerber had just received the congratulations of her opponent Ashleigh Barty and thanked the audience when she herself noticed that there was something missing at this lucky moment in Sydney. So the newly crowned winner of the WTA tournament in Sydney quickly went back to the coach’s box at the former Olympic Centre Court. And that’s where something like the picture of the day was created, including the symbol photo for this first tennis day of the 2018 season – namely a warm embrace with the new coach Wim Fissette.
“The year couldn’t have started better,”Kerber said later, after winning 6-4,6-4 over Barty. In this case, however, the teamwork between the former World Rankings First and the Belgian trainer couldn’t have developed better during the first emergency on the tour. Unbeaten, the 29-year-old from Kiel is now entering the Grand Slam adventure in Melbourne – and unlike in so many months of the past epidemic season, in which she was increasingly overlooked and hidden, she will once again be a power factor in the Grand Slam power play at the National Tennis Center. Quite a few view Kerber and compatriot Julia Görges as important co-favorites in the title conferral down under, but rarely has the starting position for German women’s tennis been as comfortable as it is now at the start of the 2018 season.
Even a week ago, Görges had already raised further expectations with the Pokalcoup in Auckland and underpinned its steeply rising form. Now Kerber followed in Sydney, the player who had replaced Görges in her breathtaking final spurt in 2017 as the number one player in Germany. Görges is now tackling the Grand Slam challenge in Melbourne as number 12 of the global tennis pecking order, and Kerber climbed back to 16th place with the triumph in Sydney. Kerber played not only in Sydney, but also at the unofficial Mixed World Championships in Perth, as if there hadn’t been the screwed-up last year. Kerber had won the last title before the direct hit in the East Australian metropolis of millions at the 2016 U. S. Open, which also meant the leap to first place and the completion of a fabulous annual series. However, the crisis was already set in at the end of the season, Kerber had completely spent his time, and at the end of the season he was also at the end of all his strength.
In 2017 it was difficult to start, but after too short a preparation the first-round match ended in Melbourne. Kerber lost matches because she had lost her most pronounced strengths: her tenacity, her tenacity, her toughness, the bite, going to the limit of pain and beyond. The crash was creeping, but in the end it was capital. Did all this also have to do with Kerber’s refusal to go new ways, to look for new minds for new tests? The Germans decided these questions only after the end of the season with the separation from their old, faithful companion Torben Beltz.
And the engagement of Fissette, the man who was once at Kim Clijsters’ side in two Grand Slam victories and who also led Sabine Lisicki to the Wimbledon final in 2013. Kerber had probably made a wise decision, namely to start the cooperation with Fissette not just head over heels in the crisis season, but to start the new year. Fissette went to work so unencumbered by previous results, and he did it with the accustomed meticulousness and clairvoyance. It is no coincidence that the Belgian man has the reputation of a brilliant analyst, a man who knows how to track down weak points in his friends and opponents, so to speak.
I have coached Angie’s opponents for years,”says Fissette,” so I was not unfamiliar with what we had to work on,”of course the Australian tennis weeks are of enormous importance for the new team, but Fiss is not only fitter and wirier these days, but also more hands-on, especially when it comes to serving – an aspect of their game that has always been regarded as a deficit. And after that, too.