Reem’s #RG16 Diary: Bacsinszky, Muguruza & practice

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  • Timea Bacsinszky is one player who should have a brilliant career in radio. She can have her own show and just give her thoughts on life and anything she wants. That’s practically what her press conferences are like anyway.

    The Swiss No8 seed has been a strong philosophical voice ever since she returned to the sport two years ago, following a stint of working in a hotel restaurant and dealing with the emotional scars of having an abusive father.

    On Saturday, Bacsinszky was asked about what it felt like playing her friend Pauline Parmentier and whether it is possible to have real friendships on tour.

    It is a topic long-discussed in tennis and became a hot one on the WTA tour when Garbine Muguruza told a Spanish newspaper last year that “we all hate each other”, referring to herself and her peers.

    Of course Bacsinszky’s response was way more elaborate than that and she even randomly name-dropped Alexandr Dolgopolov in the process.

    “Well, I think you can have some type of friendship. Look at how I work with the other players on the tour. Well, I’m more or less friends with some of them…” said the Lausanne-native, who turns 27 next week.

    “So I’m really in favour of peace. If there is one of them who doesn’t want to speak to me, I’m not going to come to her and speak to her. That’s the way I am.

    “But then if I feel there is a feeling with some players, then, yeah. We’ll meet – well, perhaps not during all the tournaments. But, for instance, Pauline, well, if we’re at the same hotel, sometimes, for example, in Rabat we played, both of us, and in the morning at breakfast I was alone and she asked if she could sit and have breakfast with me. And of course we did that. We had breakfast together…

    “But I wouldn’t say this is deep friendship. Well, you see, I know some things about her. She knows some things about me. But, you know, my friends in Switzerland, it’s totally different. I have a group of friends. That’s different type of friendship, and with the players, it’s not as deep.

    “Because I think that if you have this very profound friendship between two female players – well, it might happen, but then if they play semis in a grand slam, you know what might happen? They might bicker and they might fight in a certain way, like girls do.

    “Knowing someone well is something that helps you understand their tactics during the match. For instance, if someone is well organised in life, I don’t think that this person on a court will do anything and everything.

    “I can’t really say, I can’t give you more examples, but I was thinking, you know, what’s the name? There is a Ukrainian player who is amazing, a Ukrainian player – Dolgopolov. That’s the name. I don’t think in life he’s very organised. I don’t know. I don’t know.

    “What happens on a tennis court is something that mirrors the person you are. I have the impression, you know, those are just my beliefs and what I think, maybe someone is going to say, No, no, no, not at all. But, you know, these are the little things that you can see in the locker rooms. If a girl, you know, folds her towels away, et cetera, everything is clean and neat, if during a match you can break her game, maybe she’s going to be lost.

    “I don’t know. These are ideas I have that come to my mind. So to have deep friendships in tennis is okay, but, you know what we want to do, tennis is our bread and butter. We want to win. We can’t give too much space to others. So we have to find the right balance, I think.

    “Viktorija Golubic is one of my good friends on the tour.”

    Earlier in the week, some of the top ATP players spoke about practicing with their rivals, like Stan Wawrinka hitting frequently with Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray practicing with Rafael Nadal…

    I had asked Muguruza if she ever practiced with her fellow top-10 players. The Spaniard said: “No. No. I don’t ever see really top-10 women’s practicing with each other. Maybe, but it’s rare. I think we like to practice more with sparring partners maybe. But it’s rare, rare to see.”

    World No6 Simona Halep had a very different view.

    The Romanian said: “Yeah, I practiced with Victoria Azarenka, with Carla (Suarez Navarro), (Heather) Watson. So we practice together as much as possible.

    “Sometimes you want just to hit with a sparring to do your job or with your coach just to have the feeling. But, yeah, mostly we practice each other always.”

    So when would Halep choose to hit with her sparring partner and would she prefer a fellow player?

    “Today before the match I practiced with (Roberta) Vinci,” Halep had said after her first round win in Paris. “So you don’t know. You feel it before the day, before the practice. If you want to hit with someone else, you go for it. If not, you just take yourself the court.”

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