Cincinnati Finals

Muguruza dominates.  Garbine Muguruza continued the top notch play she displayed at Wimbledon by dominating Simona Halep in final.  Muguruza has changed her approach by putting more shape on the ball when she is out of position, particularly on her forehand side.  This technique has improved her defense, by allowing her to get points back to neutral and extending them, and helped her offense by having her big shots played when she is in a better position.  As a result, she is making fewer errors and winning many base line exchanges that she would have lost last year.  Combine these improvements with a serve that gives her a significant number of free points, and you have a dominating player.  She has to be one of the favorites at the US Open.  Although Halep said she played poorly in this final, it looked more to me like Garbine simply had an answer for everything Halep tried to do.  This was impressive tennis from Muguruza.

Dimitrov dominates.  Grigor Dimitrov used timely power inside-in forehands, a backhand that varied slice and topspin beautifully, tremendous court coverage and raquet skill, and a serve that several times reached the 130’s to take out Nick Kyrgios in straight sets.   This was the Dimitrov everybody thought they would see when he first appeared on the tour.  As great a talent as Kyrgios is, he is fundamentally an impatient player who had difficulty here when challenged time and again to play rally balls or to restart points after losing a tactical advantage.  Kyrgios’ other obvious problems – loss of concentration and foolish gamesmanship, were not evident in this match.  Here, Dimitrov simply outplayed Kyrgios, who also had a very good tournament. Kyrgios should to review film of his win this week over Nadal, when he faced almost all topspin shots to his backhand, and compare it to his to his loss in the final, where he was confronted with an unpredictable mix of topspins and slices.  Kyrgios really had trouble with that.   

            A big question is, how far will these two go in their careers?  If Dimitrov played all of the time the way he did this week, he will win more than one major and reach the world top 5.  Similarly, if Kyrgios continues to improve his concentration and grows up a bit, he will be highly successful.  In the US Open I predict Dimitrov to do better, given that the draws are comparable, because Kyrgios still goes walkabout too much to win 5-set matches consistently.  We’ll find out in a few days.