STANFORD, CALIF. – For a player who in the past two years has both overhauled her shoulder and her serve, Russia’s Maria Sharapova showed few signs of weakness in an all-business 6-4, 7-5 opening-round win over China’s Jie Zheng at the Bank of the West Classic.
“The mentality is to keep going, keep fighting, keep myself in matches and get the most out of them, just improve with every match and work myself toward the Open,” said Sharapova, who has two titles on the year, but has fallen short at the Slams.
In her first WTA Tour match since her promising run at Wimbledon (where she pushed Serena Williams 7-6(9), 6-4 in the fourth round) and her first of the U.S. summer hard-court campaign, the No. 15-ranked Sharapova reeled off 11 straight points late in the first set, including a break of Zheng at love at 4-4. The former No. 1 then served out the stanza, punctuated by an overhead forehand.
Sharapova would again break Zheng at love at 2-2 and 4-4 in the second set. But with the match on her racket at 5-4, the world No. 15 double faulted and opened the door for a Zheng comeback. The world No. 23 capitalized with a break, but Sharapova immediately broke back and went on to close out the match in 1 hour, 42 minutes.
“She’s a great player,” said Sharapova of the Aussie Open semifinalist Zheng, who managed to convert just two of seven break-point opportunities. “She’s a very good competitor. She’s had great results this year. I had to be ready. She fights to the end, like she did tonight. I had to be on top of my game.”
Her abbreviated service motion (a necessity after undergoing shoulder surgery in October ’08) now a thing of the past, Sharapova let it fly from the service stripe throughout the match, totaling six aces on the night.
“I knew eventually I would go back [to the full motion], I just didn’t quite know when,” she said. “The abbreviated serve is just something I knew I had to do for a few months. Apart from the serve, I really felt like the shoulder was feeling really good on all the other parts of my game. Even my backhand volley, which I really couldn’t hit with the shoulder, was getting a lot better. But I knew that if I was going to come back when I did last year, I had to start with an abbreviated motion. In the beginning, it was incredibly difficult to get used to. From a very young age, I was loose jointed, so all my strokes are not too cramped. To go from something that you’ve done all your life, which is pretty loose and flowy, to something really short, it took a while. It was just really inconvenient.”
The win was a significant one for Sharapova, who had fallen to Zheng in three sets at Indian Wells earlier this year, and hadn’t beaten a top-25 player since October ’09.
