Ouch. I guess I could have been a little more considered in the language of my initial post (especially given that I'm a "new poster") but I'm passionate about tennis. It's my sport - I've played, watched and supported it for more or less my whole life and I'm 50 now. I want the sport to do well, I want players, supporters and sponsors to be attracted to tennis at all levels so it continues to thrive and I was massively disappointed with this match.
I genuinely struggle to see how anyone could think that was a good level of tennis. I accept that it was windy but these are professional players who dedicate their lives to training and practicing to play an outdoor sport where the weather comes into play and they were making error after error with very little thought or adjustment. Swiatek opened the match with a couple of double faults and a couple of errors to lose the first game and there were six breaks of serve in the first seven games (I lost track of how many overall). At one point in the second set she served a double fault where the ball bounced before the net on the second serve, then served an ace on the next point (where the UK commentators praised her mental strength) then followed it up with another double fault. Sakkari could barely hit a backhand in the court.
I don't see how a match like that brings people to the sport and I would have turned it off but I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. I've just been to the WTA site to have a look at the unforced error count for the match and it looks they don't publish that stat!
Thinking about it though, I'm not sure what I intended to achieve from my initial post apart from to vent online which is something I never do. It's also clear that I have a very different opinion to posters here about the match and to have been asked if my post was a joke then called a troll in the first few responses suggests I've very much misjudged the room. Apologies if I offended anyone, I'll go back to keeping my thoughts to myself.
