Jelena-dokic.com

Jelena is back to her old self it seems as she yesterday demolished up-and-coming Russian sensation, Svetlana Kuznetsova, with a comfortable 7-6 6-1 scoreline! Kuznetsova is a very dangerous and talented player considering the amount of doubles titles she has already accumulated over the past two years and the fact that she was recently awarded the Newcomer Player of the Year award for the 2002 season. So this victory will do all the good for Dokic’s confidence when she takes to the court against the 21^st seed here, Nathalie Dechy of France.

Dokic

Dechy

As you can see, Dechy has had a fantastic start to the year by winning the tournament at the Gold Coast, Australia, has one of the best win/loss records of the year and is also one of the only player’s on the tour to stretch Kim Clijsters of Belgium to 3 sets, which she accomplished last week in Indian Wells where she reached the 4^th round. Can she make the 4^th round here at Miami as well? Only Jelena can stop that from happening when they take to the court tomorrow for one of the highlighted matches of the tournament.

In Dechy’s second round match up against doubles expert, Els Callens of Belgium, she played a very consistent game which is what she is best at it would seem. She did not serve any aces or hit a single winner the entire match. However, her percentage wins on both her first and second serve were both in the 50% area and this suggests that she does not rely on her serve to win the points at all but instead plays tactically with her ground strokes. This could be quite troublesome for Jelena depending on her level of play. If Dokic is on fire, she could easily play her “go for the winner” style of game, even if it turns out to be an unforced error, and put Dechy on the backfoot. On the other hand, Dechy’s consistency could have Jelena running all over the court causing her to commit the unforced errors.

Jelena played a very solid match yesterday. She mad her first serve percentage up in the 50% range in which she won 79% of those points! She also produced 17 winners and committed 24 unforced errors, which is very low considering Jelena’s type of aggressive play. Dokic is also coming to the net a lot more which is a very good thing to do these days as she does have the ability to hit drive volleys from any corner of the net and the variety in her game is now coming into effect because of this as she yesterday when 60% of the points when she came into the net. However, the main fault in her game yesterday was the amount of double faults she hit: 8! If she can lower these tomorrow, then she definitely has a chance to win the match.

3	Wimbledon	July 7 2002	J Dokic (7) - N Dechy (25)	7-5 6-2
1	Rome	May 21 2000	J Dokic - N Dechy (14)	6-1 4-6 6-3

In each of these matches, Dokic was able to outlast her opponent in pretty good fashion, especially at Wimbledon. It is just a matter of fighting for the matches that have ultimately led to these results and could Jelena perform the hat trick? It seems very possible in Miami! However, they have never actually met on a hard court surface before so it is again difficult to say who could win the match, despite Jelena having a 2-0 edge over the French woman.