Week in Review I

This week had the first hardcourt tournament of the summer. The tournament was at Baku and is also the last tournament before the US Open series starts. Read on to see what happened this week.


First off, Vera Zvonareva won Baku beating Ksenia Pervak in straight sets, 6-1 6-4. Although she had a pretty comprehensive victory, Zvonareva was far from her best. Throughout the tournament, her first serve percentage was quite low, and in the finals, her first serve percentage was below 50%.

The final itself wasn't very spectacular. Neither player was particularly aggressive; most of the shots were pretty weak and had a lot of margin. However, the difference between the two player's styles was that Zvonareva was still pouncing on short balls whenever she could get past the baseline.

Ksenia Pervak doesn't really impress me. She seems like a lesser version of Caroline Wozniacki. She basically pushed the ball over the net for most of the match. If Pervak wants to reach the next level, she needs to be more aggressive from the start of the match. Although she played more aggressively towards the end of the match, it was too little too late. She also needs to work on her serve, especially her second serve. Throughout the match, Zvonareva was returning Pervak's second serve midway between the baseline and the service line.

Zvonareva should get some confidence from this win. Although she started to get nervy in the end of the match, she was able to conquer it. However, she needs to lower her unforced error count while still being aggressive if she wants another shot at the US Open final and championship. During the final, she was spraying balls left and right.

So what else happened during the week? (Click the links)

Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova lost in the quarterfinals of Baku. She hit more than 60 double faults in her three matches. However, she had a good reason to. Read about why here.

There were many more Dementieva wedding photos that popped up. You can view them here, here, and here.

In terms of articles that I wrote for Tennis Tones, I wrote six of them.

Two of these articles were about the new generation of players. I wrote about Andrea Petkovic and Petra Kvitova this week. Next week, I will be covering Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

I also wrote three preview articles for the US Open series. The first one previews the US Open series on the whole and what you can expect to see. Read about it here. I also wrote previews for the two tournaments coming up next week, the Bank of the West Classic at Stanford and the Citi Open in Washington DC.

Finally, my most recent article examines the absence of the slice in the women's game.

Next week, in addition to writing about Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, I will be writing a preview for San Diego, the second tournament in the US Open Series and a guide to WTA tournaments. The WTA tournament categories aren't very clear, and I will be explaining all of them.