Andrea Petkovic has provided the biggest headline of the WTA tournament in Linz so far. On Wednesday evening, she threw the top seeded Julia Görges out of the tournament, although after 45 minutes absolutely nothing spoke for a victory. But then followed a fabulous comeback as it is otherwise only written in epics.
“I didn’t play badly. But I felt like I was in a theater of war.” Wildly gesticulating Andrea Petkovic tries to explain what just happened to her. First she pulls her left hand clenched to a fist upwards, only to spread her fingers jerkily shortly afterwards. Then she takes her right hand and repeats the gesture.
“Pew, pew!” she says with a raised voice and explains what she means by that: “There were only aces and returnwinners.” In fact, her opponent played her against the wall. Petkovic was to win a single point in the return games of the first set, she scored a total of eight points, Görges more than three times as many.
“Never before in my career have I played against a better opponent than Julia in the first one and a half sets. I only had left to pray to God that she could not keep this level.”
Their prayers have been answered. Despite strong pressure from the opposite side, Petkovic tried to get a bit more length in her strokes, and Görges tried to get a bit away from the baseline. “I also started to read her serve better – or rather, my eyes got used to the speed better,” Petkovic explains.
Görges suddenly became nervous, because her biggest weapon was suddenly dulled. Petkovic became safer from minute to minute, while the Wimbledon semi-finalists scattered more and more mistakes. Petkovic had the last word in the game, but in the end she didn’t even know that she was defending a match point in the second set.
“Above all, the way I won gives me even more self-confidence,” says the six-time WTA champion. Since the beginning of September Petkovic has had a match record of 6-2 wins. Do you wish the season would last a few more weeks?
“Mental, yes. Emotionally, yes. Physically, no, I need a break.” Always towards the end of a season Petkovic gets pain in her knee – a chronic condition caused by the climatic conditions at the tournaments in China.
“It’s pretty damp in Wuhan and Guangzhou, the knee doesn’t like it and it swells,” explains Petkovic. This is another reason why she tries to act smarter in tournament planning.
“I made the big mistake of acting like a top 10 player without being one. I played way too many matches to score points.” Her trainer Jan de Witt first suggested that she revise her way of thinking.
In the past months, she has always taken a two-week break after each tournament – with success. She noticed that she could maintain her level much better and would not suffer any physical setbacks.
The hobby writer Petkovic has already made some interesting plans for the off-season between the end of October and the end of December. She’s going to try to write her memoirs. “It should not be a classic athlete biography, but more about general things in life. But I will change one or the other name, write a few things down and put it in a novel. I don’t want to be in the tabloids all the time.”
For this undertaking Petkovic has already rented a small hut in Upstate New York. Instead of a strict training plan, a walk in the forest, two hours reading and four to five hours writing should be on the programme.
“But I’m not sure yet if I won’t have a nervous breakdown after three days,” jokes Petkovic. “I fear I will fail miserably, but it will be fun. Maybe my book ends with how I fail to write a book, who knows.” Until then, she will try to sign up for the winners list in Linz.