Mihaela Buzarnescu is one ‘heckuva’ player. She has dazzling shot-making skills that she is able to showcase thanks to her terrific footwork which allows her to get into the right position for every shot. She has the confidence to do well on any stage at this point, thanks to her impressive results over the last several months.
She has reached the only two WTA finals of her career this year (Hobart on hard courts, Prague on clay) and rapidly climbed up the WTA rankings from no.377 a year ago to number 33 currently. She is a crafty left-handed player who likes to control rallies and keep them short if possible. Thus, she will not shy away from using drops shots, taking a floating ball in the air for a put-away swing-volley, or coming to the net on any short balls that she manages to squeeze out of her opponent.
She took on Rebecca Peterson who can strike an impressive forehand and, if allowed, make her opponent chase one ball after another. The 97th-ranked Swede was playing her fifth match in one week, having come through qualifying rounds. In other words, Buzarnescu was facing against a player who, like her, preferred to take charge of rallies by powering up her ground strokes.
The good news for Buzarnescu was that, in just about every facet of the game, her skills to put that game plan to use were more developed than those of her opponent. This is precisely the type of match-up that often creates lop-sided numbers on the scoreboard, one in which both players build their A game plan on the same notion, but one party does everything a bit better than the other. Consequently, the better party negates the other’s strengths because the latter rarely ever gets a chance to use them.
Thus, the 6-1 6-2 victory for the Romanian player that lasted barely over an hour.
For example, Peterson did not get to control many rallies with her forehand, because she often found herself on defense, scrambling to retrieve Buzarnescu’s penetrating shots. She did not get to build the point on a solid first serve because Mihaela would fire the returns back, even if she missed one or two in the process – that partially explains why Peterson won less than half of the points started on her serve.
To Peterson’s credit, she recognized her opponent’s superiority in those areas in her post-match talk, but could not seem to do much about it: “It’s tough when someone is playing so solid as she did today. It’s tough to feel the rhythm to come in the match, to get the chance and the opportunities, I mean, I got no excuses, she played well.”
Believe it or not, there was an early moment in the match where Peterson had Buzarnescu in some trouble. She held her serve to start the match and went up 15-40 on Buzarnescu’s serve. The Romanian played her first dominant point of the match (Peterson dominated the early few rallies) and saved the first break point with a winning volley. On the 30-40 point, Peterson committed her only unforced backhand of the set. Who knew at that moment that it would be lights out for Peterson from that point forward?
It was indeed like if Buzarnescu suddenly shifted gears. She struck a forehand winner on the deuce point and followed it up with an exquisite 1-2-punch point to hold serve. The winners just kept coming. Buzarnescu hit 13 of them to win six games in a row and pocket the first set 6-1.
The same pattern continued until 2-0 in the second set. In that third game (and if you have watched Buzarnescu regularly, this will not come as a surprise), over what appeared to be a minor error in the grand scheme of things, Buzarnescu lost it.
Remember how Simona Halep was leading Jelena Ostapenko 3-0 in the final set of the 2017 Roland Garros final and got mad over one simple mistake? One from which she could not mentally recover quickly, and how that was partially responsible for why she let Ostapenko get back in the match on that day? Well, Buzarnescu pulled a Halep, except in much smaller scale, when she missed a forehand at 2-0, 15-0 in the second. It was neither a break point, nor a crucial one at that stage of the match. It was a mistake that allowed Peterson to get to 15-15 at a time in the match when Buzarnescu was on cruise control to win with ease.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Buzarnescu did not take it that way though.
She got mad and complained to herself for a good 10 seconds. If you did not know the score, you would have thought that the mistake cost her a break point in the late stages of a match. There was absolutely no need to have that kind of overblown reaction.
The first consequence of that kind of negativity coming out of nowhere is that it can carry over to the next point and take you out of cruise control. Well, it did…
She made another mistake at 15-15 and started to slam her racket to the ground out of anger but held back at the last second. She verbally complained some more. Two points later, Buzarnescu committed her third unforced error in four points to lose her serve. It was the only time she lost her serve, a game in which she committed almost half of her total number of unforced errors for the match. Bizarre, to say the least.
The second consequence of such an outburst is that the other player discovers hope where she thought there were none. Peterson, with renewed hope, followed that break with her best game of the match, holding serve on a forehand winner to get to 2-2.
Again, I ask: why? Why go berserk on an error at 6-1, 2-0, 15-0 when everything seems to be clicking on all cylinders? I am sure that is a question that Buzarnescu and her team have tackled. It does not change the fact that the glitch created by that one-error-related outburst took two full games to repair.
Fortunately for her – or, unfortunately for Peterson – Buzarnescu calmed down and she was able to buckle her belt and stick the landing. And the difference was so obvious! As soon as she focused back on business, she only lost five points from 2-2 to 6-2.
Buzarnescu’s next-round opponent is the fourth seed, and a possible candidate for the title, Elina Svitolina. No glitches or outbursts allowed!