By Toby Davis
LONDON (Reuters) – If winning when you are not playing well is a quality shared by sport’s most hardened competitors then Ash Barty showed she can mix it with the best of them in her victory over Anna Blinkova at Wimbledon on Thursday.
By her own admission world number one Barty was not firing on all cylinders in her second round match against the Russian, but she still came out on top in a 6-4 6-3 victory.
Her serve was erratic at times, with the Australian hitting nine double faults, while her tally of 33 unforced errors could have cost her dear against a more dangerous opponent than the 89th-ranked Blinkova.
For the relentlessly positive Barty, however, a bad day at the office is a good excuse to get back to work.
“We have another opportunity to now go out on the practice court, work on it, try to bring some good stuff in the third round,” she told reporters.
“We just go back to work. Certainly nothing that will concern me over a longer period. We have those days. We just go back to kind of the routines that we usually would and try to find a way in the next match.”
Next up for Barty is a third-round encounter with Czech Katerina Siniakova and although it was not plain sailing against Blinkova, Barty will not be making any big changes to how she approaches the game.
“I try and approach every single match with the same mindset: that’s one that I go out there and try and play my opponent one-on-one,” she said.
“I try to bring my game style and play my game style as often as possible, knowing what their strengths and weaknesses are.
“I go to work with Tyz (coach Craig Tyzzer). We work on a few things, talk about a few things. There’s nothing drastic that changes. It’s more how we like to approach how we go out there and play each and every match.”
(Reporting by Toby Davis, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
