Roland Garros – portrait of the champion: Whitney Osuigwe

I am pretty late in writing this; I know and I am sorry. It has been a busy week-end. Hoping it will help you to forgive me, and also in order not to write an article that would be too long, I decided to split this piece in two: this part will focus more on a general description of Whitney Osuigwe and on some features of her game; the second part will describe in more detail the how the final between Osugwe and Claire Liu has developed.

Though, before focusing on Osuigwe, in order to allow you to get the full picture of the events, it’s unavoidable to start from a preliminary, yet fundamental, remark: the chain reaction theory has proven to work perfectly. Not only because Whitney Osuigwe has won Roland Garros, as I predicted a few days ago (even if the score was not exactly the one I have foreseen), but also because Anna Karolina Schmiedlova won the 25k in Czech Republic! This means that: 1) Jessica Pieri, who set off the chain reaction by beating N.B.O., was then beaten by Andrei; the latter was beaten by Skamlova, who on her turn was beaten by Lapko, who, evenctually, was beaten by Schmiedlova in the final: basically, I have no fear in stating that the New Beloved One has won junior Roland Garros and a pro tour 25k held in Czech Republic at the same time. I told you she was strong…; better than mummy, it seems!

But let’s focus, now, on Whitney Osuigwe, i.e. the instrument that N.B.O. utilised to win the French Open. She was born in 2002 and is the daughter of Desmond Osuigwe, a former ATP player and currently a coach at the IMG Academy. She is not a hugely built girl; on the contrary she is fairly small and quite slender. I am proud to say that, seeing her training in Milan with McNally, I immediately realised that Whitney is very strong and in particular that she can hit the ball with tremendous pace.

I first heard of Osuigwe when she reached the semi-final in the last edition of Orange Bowl (she was beaten by the Beloved One, and that’s why I got to know her): this was the result which launched her in the junior tour. Little after, Whitney won the Asuncion Bowl, was the runner up in the Banana Bowl and semifinalist in the Eastern Bowl, all Grades 1.

Whitney entered as the 6^th seed in Bonfiglio and as the 7^th seed in the French Open, so her win in the latter tournament cannot be considered as fully unexpected. Nevertheless; ok, I was expecting her to perform well, but I did not place the girl within the top favourites: I thought that, being Whitney quite smaller and more inexperienced than Andreescu, Paigina, Potapova etc. she was a notch down compared to them. The win of Osuigwe which most surprised me was the one in the semifinals against Rybakina, who just won the Italian Open and is experiencing a great period of form. Let me ramble on Rybakina one second: I wrote that I don’t love her as a player and I won’t change my mind on that. I also wrote that I didn’t find her a particularly high level finalist on the Bonfiglio. I want to review this latter judgement: Ribakina has won 10 matches in a row split in two grades A; plus, in January she was the semi-finalist in Australian Open. There must be something in the tennis of this girl that possibly I can’t get but makes her a very tough player to beat.

The final was, thanks God, broadcasted on Eurosport player, so I eventually could watch Whitney playing in a match (against a top notch opponent, of course). I anticipate that I need to see her again, to decide if she is an extraordinary or a fantastic player, also because the effectiveness of her shots varied a bit during the match against Liu: I need a double check. The shot of Whitney’s that at first sight impressed me more was her backhand; overall, in light of this only match of Whitney I have seen, I consider this to be her best shot, even if in the second part of the match the efficiency of her forehand increased a lot and maybe her backhand went lower. In any case, she plays a double-handed quite flat shot, through which she can hit the ball at speeds similar to those reached by my FIAT 500 when I drive in a hurry: around 170 mph. During the whole first set Whitney has been unplayable on her backhand, hitting winners down the line and cross-court and, when defending, she was very good in increase topspin and height of the shot, without loosing an inch of deepness. She has shown so much power and control with her backhand, in any situation of the game, that I was very surprised that Liu stuck to playing against it: it was evident she was losing on the backhand diagonal. I was even more surprised of Liu’s choice considering the fact that, during the first set, Whitney’s forehand was not as good: when trying to accelerate or increase the pace, her ball was often short and central, allowing thus Liu to use the pace of her opponent to punch back hard; when trying to keep the pace up to reply to Liu’s strong shots, several times the topspin did not kick in and Whitney’s ball landed 2 metres long. Instead, very seldom Whitney had problems in hitting winners with the forehand against slower and higher balls of her opponent; she missed only a couple of those during the whole match (one forehand of those, though, landed 4 of 5 metres long). A peculiarity of Whitney is that she seldom slices the backhand, but chops quite often her forehand, in particular to counter lower balls (maybe she uses a closed grip, that would make a topspin shot less easy; but it is difficult to tell that while watching on TV), or when defending. But she chops her forehand also to approach the net and sometimes also to hit a passing shot. The level of Whitney’s forehand steadily increased through the match; nevertheless, also in the second and third set, during very important point she missed a couple of forehands very badly, which makes me think that her natural shot is the backhand.

I have no particular opinion on Whitney serve, which I did not find extraordinary, but not even bad: in any case, the girl is so good from the backline that it is sufficient for her to serve solidly enough not to be immediately attacked: she will, in most cases, gain anyway the control of the struggle due to the pace of her baseline shots. Whitney is 100% a base line attacker; in the final she came to the net just a few times when forced; thus, I can’t express any judgement on her net game.

The last feature I want to highlight of this girl is that she is really gutsy: though she is two years younger than her opponent, she always tried to be in control of the match, always going for a winner and trying to keep the pace up (which was what she had to do), accepting the unavoidable (or avoidable) mistakes that this 100% attacking strategy led her to commit. Both of the times she was close to winning the match, her arm shook (whose arm wouldn’t?); she doublefaulted many times and hit some bad shots, especially with her forehand; nevertheless, also in such stages, she managed to keep control of herself and continued to try her big shots until, eventually, she made it.

One last thing I want to mention: Osuigwe played also the doubles tournaments in Milan and in Paris, both times paired with McNally. The two of them have won the Bonfiglio doubles event and they reached the quarter finals in Paris, in which they were beaten in three sets (6-1 1-6 12-10 was the final result) by Potapova and Pervushina. Their loss to me was unjust, since the two girls in the same day have played: one against the other in the singles, the second round of the doubles and the quarterfinals against the strong Russian couple. For the latter, instead, the one against Osuigwe and McNelly was the first match of their day. I wonder if the result wouldn’t have been reversed if the match had been played starting from more equal conditions. However, I guess Whitney is happy enough with her results.