Tennis: Abrams picks the Women’s Final of the Volvo Car Open - Caroline Wozniacki vs Madison Keys  

Caroline Wozniacki over Madison Keys

Caroline Wozniacki exerted her will upon Croatian Petra Martic yesterday to gain the finals of the Volvo Car Open. Wozniacki, the 5th seed, has now gotten to the finals three times in Charleston and will play American Madison Keys for her second Volvo championship and the $141,420 top prize.

Wozniacki was simply more efficient than Martic, as she served well and won 75% of her first serves, a very high number for women on clay. The Dane also notched 21 winners and only committed 13 unforced errors, compared to Martic’s erratic 24 unforced errors to only 19 winners. It wasn’t that Martic didn’t hit enough winners; rather, she just made too many errors to seriously challenge the steady Wozniacki.

Still, it was a very good week for the very appealing Martic, as she came away with four good wins and will move up in the rankings. She has a strong, attacking game, but all of the four semi-finalists tend to misuse the drop shot, and Martic should work on a sound strategy surrounding that shot. Because the women are shorter, slower, weaker, and don’t volley as well as the men, they need to be more accurate with that shot and others. Unfortunately, when they try to hit a drop shot half of the time it’s the wrong shot at the wrong time and it doesn’t make it over the net or sets up a simple winner for their opponent. Fifty-percent of the other half are poorly executed and result in the hitter losing the point because they’re either out of position to defend against the next shot, or their reflexes are too slow to volley something thrown in the air near them. A few reflex volley drills would help, including some two-on-ones, and I don’t understand why their coaches don’t take them out and do the drills. It’s possible that since this really was the first clay court tournament of the season that the women just aren’t yet used to the strategy used on these courts. But it seems a universal problem for all the women on the WTA Tour, except perhaps for Ash Barty.

In yesterday’s second semi-final, Madison Keys finally showed a return to the form that got her to the 2017 U.S. Open final and took out Puerto Rico’s Monica Puig 6-4, 6-0. The match was actually much closer than the final score. With the first set tied at 4-4 and seemingly up for grabs, Keys attacked and Puig misfired, and in an instant the set was Keys’. Emboldened by her first set triumph, Keys began hitting harder and harder from the baseline, and as her confidence zoomed, so too did her telltale forehand. When Keys misses, her forehand tends to go astray, both long and wide... In yesterday’s second set, Keys was hitting hard and deep, and most of her shots were going in, which ultimately spelled the difference between the two. But it wasn’t just her forehand that made it tough on the Puerto Rican. At 4-0 in the second, serving to the ad court at 30-15, Keys hit a 115 mph serve down the T that hit both lines where they intersect to form the T, and for all intents and purposes the match was over. Puig never gave up, and continued to pound groundstrokes at her American opponent, but by then it was too little, too late. Keys was sky high in confidence, and she went for it all…and hit her way into tomorrow’s finals.

I expect to see Wozniacki win tomorrow for the simple reason that she makes more than she misses, and on the whole, Keys does the opposite. Yes, Keys will try to dictate play as she always does, but Woz won’t be intimidated by the sheer speed of the American’s shots. It’s the volume of shots, not the pace of them, that win matches, and really the best description I can give about women’s matches is that they are more often lost than won. Keys will miss, and will lose.