Me: Pavlyuchenkova obviously came out playing really well. How do you adjust your game? Is it more instinct or do you kind of think about what shots are troubling her?
Vera Zvonareva: Yeah, I was thinking ‘you know, I think it’s too early to get instincts on the clay yet’, so I was always finding myself, you know, thinking about ‘ok, from this position I better go for this kind of shot’. Sometimes I felt like I was making wrong decisions, but I was just trying to adjust. I kept telling myself ‘ok, if you’re in this position next time, just play deeper - put more rotation on the ball. Don’t go for a winner because it’s impossible on a clay court. So I just, you know, kept talking to myself like this. And at the end, I think I was able to manage to play like I should play on the clay, a little better in that third set. Of course still it wasn’t perfect but overall, I was able to change the momentum of the match, and I’m really happy about that’.
Yep, crazy indeed.