Immediately following in the vulturing foot steps of her inspiration Wozniacki she withdrew from the MD(!) in Doha to play the 50k in Kreuzlingen instead. The week before she's playing Q (!) in Dubai. I mean...huh?!
Shouldn't there be a rule to prevent that? I think I remember reading a player can't play a lower-level tournament if she has direct entry to a P5/PM in the same week. I guess that applies to Premier Mandatories and Grand Slams only, as Doha is a Premier 5.
Normally, I hate using the "vulturing" word, but this is true vulturing.
So Carina wouldn't have had to play a top-10 player had she played the first round of Doha, and there's no Serena, Maria, or Vika in the draw. (60 points for one win / 105 points for two)
She had better vulture those 80 ITF points by winning the damn thing, or this becomes an epic failure.
I woke up at 5:30 a.m. expecting to watch a comfortable win. Instead, someone I had never even heard of plays probably one of her best matches, hitting over 40 winners while looking like the better player for most of the match.
Carina didn't play that badly but was playing her normal "power-pushing" game, understandably expecting that there's no way her opponent could keep it up. And she was nearly right, but again, Alexandrova came up with the winners in the final tiebreak.
There must be something about Carina's game that allows opponents to play their best and look much better than their ranking. Power-pushing doesn't work on fast indoor hard-court.
Not really related to anything recent but I just got around to reading it:
According to the German "Tennismagazin" Carina's coaching team for this year's Australian Open consisted of:
Her boyfriend
Her boyfriend's brother
Her boyfriend's cousin
Sometimes I'm wondering if it's a specifically German thing to have so much difficulty having a professional team around you or whether that affects the whole WTA and I just don't notice it because I don't pay enough attention.
That's something to start with, got bagled and had the balls to stay in the match. Should help her confidence. Still, I feel like Carina has to get more involved into matches. I sometimes feel, she's standing beside herself playing a match, letting things happen and can't do anything about it. She needs intensity.