The Spaniard changes her game to adapt to the agressiveness of current tennis.

Things have changed in current tennis, but Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, eliminated by Martina Hingis in the US Open, has adapted her game to the new needs of the circuit. It isn’t easy at 27 y.o, when she could be thinking more of her retirement than of improving her game. But that’s the way she is. She refuses to accept that the best of her career is what she has achieved : four Grand Slam titles and being the number one in singles and doubles.

Arantxa found out in 1997 that if she didn’t change her game, she couldn’t be in the elite. That was an awful year for the Spaniard. It was the worst crisis in her career and sometimes she couldn’t believe she was playing so badly. She lost her confidence, and even before playing in Roland Garros, she seemed not to be able to hit a good drive. She had played two Grand Slam finals, the Olympic Games final and the Masters final, and she had lost the four ones, which affected her a lot.

But instead of ‘falling down’, the Spaniard recovered from that and decided to be trained by her brother to find the way. ‘With humility, patience and work she’ll get it’, he said,. And that’s the way it was. The most important problem was that the new generation made the tennis faster, more agressive and risky. And her legs, very important in many victories, were not enough’

‘Yes, it’s obvious that my game has changed’, said Arantxa after her defeat against Martina Hingis. ‘the young players hit very hard and you have to be very well physica- and psychically to follow the rythm. I have been adapting my game and have improved some things in my game: my serve, agressiveness, to force my rivals. Only if you do this, you
have a chance of being among the best ones’

Someone tells that in a training in New York, Emilio stopped the training because Arantxa was passing the balls two metres over the net. ‘Arantxa, you won’t defeat anybody that way’,he said. That is history, that Arantxa reappears only once in a while. She is more agressive and takes more risks, even with her drive which, being her weakness, lets her win more points.

In the four matches she has played in the US Open, Arantxa has got 73 winners, 7 serve points, and 94 unforced errors.