“Sandra Zavvskaya commented on the unsuccessful segment of Martha Kostyuk”, – WRITE: Sport.ua
“In tennis, everything can change in just one week.
You win the tournament and suddenly rise to thirty positions in the rating, your confidence reaches the peak, and the season, which seemed uncertain a few days ago, now seems full of opportunities. Play a great match against the best player in the world, and it’s hard not to believe that you have crossed some invisible border – that the version of yourself you wanted has finally appeared.
But tennis is not interested in your story. The same week that can move you forward, with the same ease can discard you in the opposite direction, and rarely when you can predict what happens.
This year, our soil season has started with more questions than answers. We came to Madrid when Martha was slightly injured and was not sure whether she could go to the court. It was one of those situations where only a few days to recover could solve everything. Until the last moment we were not sure, but then she suddenly went to the court.
And as soon as she stepped on the court, all the doubts seemed to melt. She clearly beat the ball, kept positions in long draws and played with such freedom that you cannot always feel when you deal with physical problems. In the quarterfinals, she met with Arina Sabalenko – the first racket of the world to play so that the rivals do not have room for maneuver – and Marta forced her to stand on a hundred. She lost 7: 6, 7: 6, having a set point in both sets.
Most remembered not the bill, but how it behaved in the match. Patience in drawing. Pressure decision making. The language between the points is calm, balanced, quietly confident. We went with such a sense of conviction that you will not often meet in this sport. It was not just hope or desire, it was the feeling that something was clicking that we had passed through the doors that were closed for a long time.
A week later, they played with each other again. This time in the fourth round. Martha lost the first set 6: 1, but the second set was tense-one that could be broken into one or two points. She did not win, but the level remained the same, her mood was determined, and the energy on the court was as charged as a week earlier. She lost, but we went home with a high head. We all saw and felt something clicking.
And then Rolan Garros came.
The first round. A qualification racket that ranks around 150 in the world rating. The defeat that caught us by surprise and was difficult to explain in the context of the previous weeks. It was not just a bad day – it was the complete opposite of what everyone expected.
This defeat was not easy to survive, but we wrote it for one bad day and returned to training. The workout went well, the mood was right, but when we returned to the tournaments – this time on the grass – the same thing happened. Three tournaments in a row, three defeats in the first round.
A strange thing in a series of defeat is how quickly it begins to seem endless. Days and weeks pass, but the last victory seems to have won months ago. You start measuring the time of matches that have not won. Then was Washington – and again the first round. Six in a row without victory, stretched for almost three months.
It is one thing to lose when you know that you are playing bad – at least then there is a clear understanding of where to start. But when the game goes well, the workouts are high, you just fought with the best in the world, and victories still don’t come? This is a completely different challenge, and as a coach I collided with him for the first time.
The series of defeat exposes you to the donut. She picks up the impulse that you thought was you, and lifts it to the light, forcing you to doubt whether he has ever been. It pushes you into a space where the results cease to confirm your work, and there is only one thing – whether you can continue to appear without this external evidence.
But hell, how difficult it is to continue. First, it seems that it lasts forever. Secondly, you try to find a solution to a problem that ask you a million different questions. Could we do something better? If so, when? Where? Is it not a good forthand enough, or maybe Beckhend? Maybe it’s about moving? Or maybe the reason is not on the court? You brainstorm, analyze, scroll through the points at night.
You are looking for patterns, some resistance that you can grasp to feel control of the situation. One thing can be said for sure: even if you can’t find the reason, your main task as a coach at such moments is to stand for your player as a strong brick wall. You have no choice.
You know that the player is doubting and you have to balance it. You have to believe when they can’t, without pretending that there is no doubt.
And last week in Montreal she finally won the match.
One might think that it was like a huge burden, and in some sense it was – as if you had exhaled, holding your breath for a few minutes. But the most amazing was how quickly everything ended. Five minutes later, we already discussed the next match and how strange that it did not seem as important as we thought. For three months, we were in the fog, fighting with doubts and disbelief that everything can turn so. And when everything finally changed, it didn’t look like fireworks. It was like the fact that we just returned to the work that we were doing all this time.
Looking back, perhaps that is exactly what we tried to teach all this period. After Madrid, it was so easy to look forward – to believe that the door has just opened and the path ahead would look in a certain way. We have seen it so clearly: impulse, the feeling that we came to a new place. And then reality came, and it did not match the picture in our heads.
It’s not just tennis. This is when you start a new job, I am convinced that you have found your perfect place, and after six months you realize that you are not sure whether you want to stay there. This is when you meet someone and feel an instant connection, imagining the next section, not starting the first – and then you see how everything disappears for reasons that you did not anticipate. It is the launch of the project in which you put the whole soul, and instead of flying, it is just … standing still.
We love Madrid moments – breakthroughs, clarity, when “everything is in place” – but they deceive us, forcing you to think that the future is a straight line. And when it’s wrong, we feel stunned, as if something went wrong.
But the fact is that both in sports and life history does not follow our time scale. The task is to stay in the present and play the party that is, not the one you dreamed of. Allow the match, work or relationships to develop without trying to jump to the part where everything is.
In tennis, everything can change in a week. In life too. But sometimes the changes are related not so much with victory or defeat as with To weaken the grip on the story in which you think you are in order you can really live the one that is happening.
Earlier, Kostyuk explained why she starred from the prestigious WTA 1000 in Cincinnat.