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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  Dominika Cibulkova: the little gladiator
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Dominika Cibulkova: the little gladiator

Despite her diminutive figure, the Slovakian is growing in stature thanks to her never-say-die brand of tennis

Photo: AFPPremium
Photo: AFP

The best tennis news of the week has to be the arrival, at the top of the game, of Dominika Cibulkova. Last Sunday, she won the WTA Finals tournament in Singapore in truly emphatic fashion, 6-3, 6-4, over Angelique Kerber, the world No. 1.

And believe me, by “emphatic" I don’t mean this was a one-sided match. The set scores don’t suggest it and if you watched even the highlights, you wouldn’t get that impression. Kerber had her moments; Cibulkova just had more. No, what I mean by that word is a comment on the way this woman played the final.

But more on that in a bit.

I have been a fan of Cibulkova for some years now. Let me confess that, at least initially, this was because of her looks: her long hair and a wide, impossibly infectious smile. But her playing style captivated me even more. She whirls around the court like a dynamo, quick to her shots and quick between points.

That impression is underlined by her size: at 5ft 3in (1.6m), she is among the shortest players on the professional tour. In comparison, Serena Williams is 5ft 9in, her sister Venus is 6ft 1in, Garbiñe Muguruza is 6ft and even Kerber is 5ft 8in.

So, watching Cibulkova is something akin to watching a superbly athletic hamster streak to every corner of the court and back, hammering her shots over and over again.

It’s a playing style that has brought her some success so far, if not quite the big results. She turned pro in 2004 and won two minor (ITF) tournaments in 2005 and 2006.

In early 2007, she played the Canara Bank Open in Bengaluru, beating Indian wild card Tara Iyer in the first round, but losing in the second round. Still, that helped her raise her ranking enough to qualify for the main draws in the Grand Slams that year. She started making reasonable runs in other upper-echelon tournaments too, enough to rank her among the top 20 or 25 women in the world.

In the next few years, she had wins over such stars as Venus Williams, Marion Bartoli, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Caroline Wozniacki, showing that she could play and beat the best. But it took till 2011 for her to win her first WTA tournament, the Kremlin Cup in Moscow. She followed that up with one title each in 2012 and 2013.

And then came the Australian Open in early 2014. Cibulkova was seeded No. 20. A number like that suggests to tennis-watchers like me that this is a very good player, but not one we expect to progress very far through the draw.

She will win a couple of rounds, maybe three, we think. Then someone from among the elite seeds, the real title contenders—which at that Aussie Open included Serena Williams, Sharapova, Victoria Azarenka and Petra Kvitova—will put her in her place.

But that didn’t happen. A Cibulkova fan already, I remember following her remarkable progress through that Australian Open draw, my jaw dropping further with every victory.

In six matches, she lost a total of one—count ’em, one—set, to Sharapova in the fourth round. Other than that 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 triumph, she won her matches with astonishing ease, even posting three 6-0 sets.

In the quarter-finals and semi-finals, she simply demolished two players already known for their clever, tenacious all-court games—Simona Halep and Agnieszka Radwańska.

Could she take that momentum through one last match, all the way to a Grand Slam title?

Sadly, that wasn’t to be. In the final, she ran into China’s superstar, Li Na, at the top of her game. Li won that match and the title, 7-6, 6-0.

But even with that second-set blanking, Cibulkova had no reason to feel discouraged. For this march to the final could only be a boost to her career. Playing at her best, she must have known, she was better than a No. 20 seed.

She won the Mexican Open a month later, but then took home no more WTA titles—until this year. Three titles and three runner-up finishes in 2016 meant she qualified for the WTA Finals in Singapore.

This season-ending tournament brings together the eight players with the best results through the year. They are divided into two groups and, uniquely among professional tournaments, play a round-robin format.

In each group, each woman plays all the others, and the two with the best records advance to the semi-finals. Since these are the world’s best players, they can’t expect any easy matches and there usually are none.

Cibulkova was grouped with Kerber, Halep and Madison Keys. She lost a tight three-set match to Kerber, then Keys thrashed her 6-1, 6-4, nearly eliminating her from the tournament. But because Kerber won all her matches, the format left Cibulkova with this equation in her last round-robin match: if she beat Halep, she would advance.

Which she did, warming now to the full potential of her intense playing style. In the semi-finals, she was a veritable buzzsaw, wearing down Kuznetsova in three sets. That set her up to play Kerber again, now in the final.

Kerber had been so dominant all through the tournament that few would have bet on Cibulkova beating her. But those who saw their first match, earlier in the week, knew that Cibulkova had the tools and the tennis craft to match and beat Kerber, if she could put it all together.

Which she did. There’s a 10-minute clip of highlights from the match on YouTube that’s worth watching solely for the tennis exhibition that Cibulkova puts on.

From the first point on, her fierce, relentless, single-minded shotmaking has Kerber scrambling to keep up. Cibulkova repeatedly finds angle and range that turn back even Kerber’s masterful retrieving skills.

At 1-1 in the second set, the two women play out a 15-shot rally that, in some odd way, sums up the whole contest. Kerber wins the point, but the effort she has to put into it takes so much out of her that she lets out a primal scream after the final shot. There’s relief in that scream. But you sense she has also realized that today, the little gladiator across the net has just too many weapons.

Above all, Cibulkova touches a chord in me because she plays the game the way I would like to play it myself. No holding back, aggressive all the time, chasing every ball, never giving up. It’s an enormous effort of body and mind to keep that style up through a whole match, a whole tournament, a whole career.

Cibulkova actually credits her victory, and her results this year, to a newfound mental strength, to finally believing that she can win the big matches and tournaments. That drives her shotmaking and her success.

And maybe it’s just my opinion, but I believe this is tennis the way it was meant to be played.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

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Published: 05 Nov 2016, 11:23 PM IST
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