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Caroline Garcia

363K views 5K replies 155 participants last post by  maloofhoof 
#1 ·
Caro is currently France's number 2 in the 1993 generation, far away from Kristina obviously. Still, her results are good enough to follow them on a thread. She is born in October, which could explain why her talent has been overshadowed by girls born earlier in the year.

She plays with a double-handed backhand and her best shot is definitely her serve. Her forehand has lots of firepower as well. She still has to work on her return and movement, I'd say.

She is 64th on the junior ranking (but won her first Grade 1 tournament beating Allgurin, Mestach and Cepede). On the pro tour, she is part of top 700 thanks to good showings in 25k. She's slightly overanked I think but she does have interesting wins over Riner, Dabija and Kondratieva.

Allez Caro :)
 
#477 ·
Her worst loss this season. It must have been horrible to watch, poor Corswandt.

Kiki & Caro really manage very poorly their season. They have consistently failed to qualify and yet they keep on entering WTA tournaments. I do think playing shitty 25k in South America would be better than this mess.
 
#480 · (Edited)
Caroline was playing standard issue #100-200 range tennis, aggressive variant (picture say Corinna Dentoni, Mandy Minella, Vitalia Diatchenko or Lesia Tsurenko), only very badly. And that was even before the meltdowns began - near the end of both sets, and were they ugly.

Even her BH swing, which I remembered as a bit stiff from previous matches, is actually smooth as silk, but her tactics are just a mess. She has the potential to be a good shotmaker, but is made to play like a claycourt grinder, when her footwork and consistency just aren't up to it. She either takes the ball early - which she can do given how good her technique is - or plays higher %. Going for crazy shots from 2 meters behind the baseline just won't cut it. Kept overhitting throughout. Plus that retarded court positioning means she doesn't take advantage of the soft balls she earns with her serve. Leaving half of the court wide open to hit FHs that don't even allow her to take over the point, let alone finish it - not smart. Watson just counterattacked into the open space. Watson has a fairly good serve for her size, but that's no excuse for the dismal returning I saw. Safarova level - slow to react, and then didn't move her feet at all.

When her coach went to talk to Caroline after the first set disaster, he gave her useful advice by the looks of it - hitting her BH with more margin and topspin, rallying a bit more instead of going for shots that weren't there. Caroline did just that, and it worked for a half dozen points or so, but then it was all-out self-destruction again. An untimely DF or a bad return game, and there goes her confidence.

Time to play down to work on match playing skills, return game and learn how to fucking rally - improvements might take months. And when I say "improvements", I mean achieving an acceptable level of shotmaker-lite #100-200 tennis like that of the players I mentioned above. Because playing at anything close to top 100 level seems like a mirage right now.
 
#496 · (Edited)
This is some progress, at least. Baby steps.

Edit: after reading other posts about it I realise that she actually showed a lot of fight in this match. Yes, that's progress indeed. Now just has to start doing that more often. When she regularly has more good weeks than bad weeks we're talking turkey- but this is a very nice start.
 
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