{"id":174562,"date":"2025-10-02T06:24:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T06:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/174562\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T06:24:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T06:24:07","slug":"iga-swiateks-bagel-defeat-to-emma-navarro-and-the-difficulties-of-changing-tennis-in-real-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/174562\/","title":{"rendered":"Iga \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s bagel defeat to Emma Navarro and the difficulties of changing tennis in real time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having spoken after her last match about the relentlessness of the tennis schedule, Iga \u015awi\u0105tek<\/a> suffered a final-set bagel against Emma Navarro at the China Open Wednesday.<\/p>\n

In a performance that had earlier brought back memories of some of her struggles in the second half of last year, \u015awi\u0105tek battled back from being a break down in the second set but ultimately lost by a 6-4, 4-6, 6-0 scoreline. American world No. 17 Navarro returned aggressively, defended resolutely and used changes of speed and height to extract as much as she could out of an errant \u015awi\u0105tek in her joint-biggest career win by ranking against the world No. 2.<\/p>\n

In many of \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s matches last year, from Wimbledon onwards, she would resolutely stick to all-out aggression even if it wasn\u2019t really working. Under coach Wim Fisette, who replaced Tomasz Wiktorowski last October, \u015awi\u0105tek has been much better at using her innate movement and counterpunching skills to change the course of matches, but Wednesday saw the default to aggression in the face of adversity that Wiktorowski had introduced reemerge like a ghost.<\/p>\n

\u015awi\u0105tek frequently berated herself after going for too much and making an unforced error in the face of her opponent\u2019s dogged retrieval skills. She hit 70 in all, the second-most in her career. Navarro\u2019s game is in many ways a less devastating version of \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s, but the world No. 2 did not force the American to play beyond her level often enough. She has spoken several times this year about the difficulty of replacing one version of tennis on top of another in real time, and those difficulties reemerged in Beijing.<\/p>\n

There is a similarity with Coco Gauff\u2019s remaking her serve during the U.S. Open<\/a> and the variance in her double-fault rate during the tournament; the difference is that \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s changes are across various strokes, rather than just one, and so it can be less easy to see how they are taking hold.<\/p>\n

Swi\u0105tek had said in a news conference Monday that she may \u201chave to choose some tournaments and skip them, even though they are mandatory\u201d in order to remain ready to compete at the highest level.<\/p>\n

\u201cWTA with all these mandatory rules, they made this pretty crazy for us,\u201d she continued. \u201cI don\u2019t think any top player will actually be able to achieve this, playing the six 500 tournaments. It\u2019s just impossible to squeeze it in the schedule. I think we have to be smart about it, not really unfortunately care about the rules and just think what\u2019s healthy for us. Yeah, it\u2019s tough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The WTA released a statement saying that \u201cathlete welfare is always a top priority\u201d and emphasized the $400 million increase in player compensation that the new rules on mandatory events have underpinned.<\/p>\n

\u015awi\u0105tek arrived in Beijing straight from winning the Korea Open on September 21, and, underlining the non-stop nature of the tour, will compete at next week\u2019s Wuhan Open. She\u2019ll hope to close the gap on world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, having missed the opportunity to make major inroads this week. Based on points for just this year, Sabalenka has a lead of 1,457 points, and will return to the court in Wuhan having not played since winning the U.S. Open almost a month ago.<\/p>\n

Navarro, buoyed by her best win of the season, will face Ukraine\u2019s Marta Kostyuk or American No. 5 seed Jessica Pegula in the China Open quarterfinals Friday.<\/p>\n

(Photo: Shi Tang \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having spoken after her last match about the relentlessness of the tennis schedule, Iga \u015awi\u0105tek suffered a final-set…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-174562","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}