#iriwa

Examples include:

Pink Fantasy- Fantasy

Lee Hi- No One

Nature- I’m So Pretty

Mamamoo- Waggy

Niñas 

Fantasy MV

I basically agree with all of that. Even Clijsters comparison makes sense, including this little bit of difference in attacking mindset.

And I agree on Barty - I want to like her, but she's just there...

I really like what I've seen from Andrulescu, but I don't trust it. I kinda stopped trusting all young players at some point. They show promise, but no one is able to achieve any sort of consistency.

They like to say that the lack of consistency is just a sign of the competitiveness of the game improving. But then I don’t know how that holds true when Serena is still a serious contender for Slam titles. I’ve seen all sorts of theories as to why the newer players in both the men’s and women’s games are “not as good” -- everything ranging from the effects of social media to the effects of doping. The most interesting theory to me is the one about the transition from wooden racquets to today’s poly/composite material. There’s a belief that when a player tires or feels under pressure, their strokes begin to break down and the less sound their strokes were to begin with, the more of a disaster it becomes.

I hardly play tennis (I don’t even think I’ve gone for a hit since before 2008) so I don’t really know. (They just opened a new court near my home last month so maybe I should try to go.)

In the match against Mertens, the commentators kept going on about how strong Andreescu’s legs are and how good she was at getting to low balls so what do I know? There’s a lot of rushing and snatching at balls in her game (though, TBF, she was suffering in the humidity). It’s kind of like a sort of swagger though that many other players seem to lack but it also feels very precarious. With all the counterpuncher-type players you know what to expect but Andreescu is so unpredictable compared to the rest of them. Sometimes you want to scream at her for doing something ill-advised EXCEPT for the fact that it works for her often enough that you can’t really call it a “mistake.” Or, rather, if it were some other player you’d think they were a bonehead but with Andreescu you just shrug your shoulders and move on.

That said, I don’t even know if it’s fair to call her a “counterpuncher.”

The last two times any young players on the women’s side excited me to the point where I thought they’d achieve great things were Serena Williams and Justine Henin and even with how short Justine’s career was they both achieved more than I thought they would.

I think the only players since Henin that really impressed me with their actual games were Azarenka and Kvitova but Victoria Azarenka is like a Jennifer Capriati and Petra Kvitova is like a Mary Pierce. If I want to be generous I’d throw Naomi Osaka and Svetlana Kuznetsova into the mix. (But it’s not like I ever felt the urge to record and rewatch any of their matches, let alone join a bunch of other folks in contributing to databases of recorded matches.)

Contrast all that with the actual most successful player since, Sharapova, who was simply reliant on just a Plan A working and has such a disastrously one-sided record against Serena.

Iriwa Japonese [Pink Fantasy]