Thanks to Adam Wells for watching and recapping the second of today’s round robin matches in Singapore between Simona Halep and Eugenie Bouchard.  Enjoy…

This match saw the youngest women in the game’s top 20 making their Tour Finals debut. And to say the occasion got to the younger of the two would be an understatement.

It was clear from the opening exchanges that Bouchard, as expected, was looking to be the aggressor, with Halep happy to play a more conservative game.  And that more cautious approach served Halep very well indeed, as early nerves visibly affected them both. It was Bouchard, playing with so little margin for error, who really suffered.

Breaking in the first game, courtesy of some wayward Bouchard groundstrokes, Halep settled much the quicker. Her extra three years on tour, understandably, seemed to have given her a real edge in maturity. For the rest of the set it was hit and miss from Bouchard, though much more miss than hit. Admirably, though perhaps naively, she refused to compromise her game-plan. She went after everything, but her timing and range were way off. More errors and a double fault gave Halep a double break in a set that never felt like a contest. Halep made the odd nervy error of her own, but she was playing by far the steadier game, and cleverly extended the rallies until Bouchard lost the point. Two unforced errors from Halep to 16 from Bouchard summed up the set.

One thing you couldn’t accuse Bouchard of was losing her cool. There were echoes of Maria at her ice cold best, never seemingly phased by her game crumbling around her. She improved in the second set, but not nearly enough to turn the match around. There were glimpses of brilliance, but they were far too few to outdo the errors.

At 1-3 and 15-40 down, Bouchard was handed a lifeline when Halep made a mistake to rival any the Canadian had made. Hitting the net from inside the service box with an open court yawning in front of her, it looked like Halep had let Bouchard back into the match. But it wasn’t to be. She kept swinging and missing off both sides, though the forehand was especially poor, and couldn’t find the court enough times to trouble her far more solid opponent.

She fittingly doubled faulted at match point down, her second in a game that, like her performance as a whole, was strewn with errors.

In the post-match interview, Halep said she thought she’d played a great game. I think it was much more a case that she played a better game than Bouchard. I won’t be too harsh on her though. An occasion such as this can get to anyone; just look at Sabine Lisicki in that Wimbledon final! And it’s easy to forget just how far Bouchard has come in a short space of time. I think it’s safe to say, it’s only going to get better from a player who was still competing in Junior Wimbledon two years ago.

This post was written by Adam Wells