Li Na Upsets Caroline Wozniacki in Australian Open Semifinal: In-Depth Analysis

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at Internationaled.org

Published: January 27, 2011

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Li Na shrugged off early mishaps to dump world No. 1 and top seed Caroline Wozniacki out of the Australian Open and book her place in Saturday's final with Kim Clijsters.

Already the most successful Chinese tennis player ever, Li took another step to tennis history with her 3-6, 7-5, 6-3 victory in Melbourne.

Li had to save a match point at 4-5 in the second set and then she never looked back, displaying the ruthless power forehand that had inexplicably gone astray in the opening set.

Here's an in-depth analysis into the Wozniacki postmortem. For an excellent article on the rising star that is Li Na, B/R featured columnist Cliff Potter wrote an excellent piece today after her victory. You can read it here.

 

First Set

Wozniacki was her usual unspectacularly efficient self in the first set. She dominated points on her first serve and essentially sat back as Li beat herself with an array of errors from the back of the court.

I don't think Wozniacki came into this match with a game plan to attack the Li forehand, but as soon as it became evident that she was struggling to control her baseline ground strokes, Wozniacki went after the forehand with calm zeal.

As you can see from the graphic below, Wozniacki served to the Na forehand almost in isolation, only going out wide to the backhand in the ad court where Li couldn't do as much damage.

Li tried to attack those second serves by stepping inside the baseline, but everything was flying long off her racket in the heat of the day.



Li did hit winners as she has done throughout the tournament, but the problem was the unforced errors. The official count was 17, and they were spread out. The red dots on the graphic below right show the forehand errors, while the backhand mistakes are highlighted by black dots.

There really was no consistency to her game, and even though she hit ...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Tennis

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