The Wimbledon championship tournament is just around the corner. While most of the attention is being paid to Serena Williams, the women’s side is wide open. We’ve seen that as she’s faltered over the last six months, failing to take either the Australian Open or French Open.
We saw Garbine Muguruza come out of nowhere to win the French Open. Is there someone like that who could surprise at Wimbledon? The four players on this list aren’t the four players who will – or should – be expected to make a deep run, but if you want four dark horse candidates for advancement into the fourth round or quarterfinals at the All-England Club, these stand out for varying reasons.
Tsvetana Pironkova
There is something to be said for the idea that Pironkova is only good on grass, but she made the French Open quarterfinals a few weeks ago in Paris. She’s simply been playing good tennis the past several weeks. She’s won multiple matches in grass-court warm-up tournaments, and this could carry into her Wimbledon journey this year. Pironkova does not hit the ball extremely hard. She wins by redirecting the ball, controlling the flight of her shots to keep them in the court, and offering various spins and speeds to opponents who always have to hit a different kind of shot to keep up with her. On grass, a finesse game works reasonably well as long as the opponent doesn’t have a booming serve or overwhelmingly powerful weapons. If Pironkova gets the right kind of draw, she could definitely make the quarterfinals.
Kirsten Flipkens
Flipkens didn’t do very much outside of grass, but her recent win over French Open champion Garbine Muguruza shows that the Belgian can get on a roll and win some matches on grass. Flipkens has made only one Grand Slam semifinal, and that was at Wimbledon in 2013. She was a total surprise back then, and after the win over Muguruza, she could make noise once more. Flipkens also hits off-pace shots. She is a frustrating opponent to play for anyone who doesn’t have a lot of experience and can’t easily use a serve or a forehand to win points in five strokes or fewer. Her run this week at the Mallorca Open has given her a real reason to think she can make a push at Wimbledon.
Sabine Lisicki
The thing with Lisicki is that unlike Pironkova or Flipkens, she hasn’t been playing well of late. She doesn’t have a tournament performance in the past five weeks which can give her confidence or the idea that she has played her way into form. Lisicki is out of rhythm, and that undeniably works against her. However, for all of her weaknesses, Lisicki has the powerful kind of serve which can win lots of cheap points and make a difference on a grass surface in which winning points more quickly is essential. Players have to win grass points more quickly than on other surfaces, and Lisicki can still do that. She’s still dangerous despite all the losses and the lack of good form. Sometimes all it takes is to make it to a big grandslam like this to regain the focus.
CoCo Vandeweghe
The quarterfinalist last year at Wimbledon will probably face a high seed in the third or fourth round, but Vandeweghe hits a massive serve, and she just beat Agnieszka Radwanska in Birmingham, the main grass warm-up for Wimbledon. Radwanska, although struggling in recent weeks, was still the No. 2 seed at that event. That win also gave Vandeweghe her first win over a top-five player, which is quite significant. And remember last year, she upset Karolina Pliskova and Lucie Safarova – both of whom were ranked – before giving No. 2 Maria Sharapova everything she could handle.
Vandeweghe will have more attention on her compared to last year – especially given how she’s played this year. Going into this week, she had connected on 136 aces, which was the fifth most in the WTA. She’s won two-thirds of her matches on grasses compared to the hard courts, where she has won just 45.2% of her contests.
But she’s still not in the top hierarchy of candidates to go deep into the tournament. Yet, she might still go far anyway. She could be that good.
