By Jonathan Liew
All great athletes need fear as much as they need hope. Jonny Wilkinson had the fear every time he kicked. Diego Maradona had it. Virtually all boxers have it. And in her clinical 6-3, 6-2 demolition of Eugenie Bouchard in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open, Sharapova showed that she has it, too.
What might one of the sport's most decorated players possibly be afraid of? For one thing, her father. Sharapova revealed afterwards that following her hair-raising second-round win against Alexandra Panova, in which she saved two match points against the world No.150, her father Yuri made a stern phone call.
Maria Sharapova.Credit: Getty Images
What did he say to her? "In a nice version: 'This is unacceptable'," she said. "When you're down and out, like I was in the second match, I don't want to face that phone call with my father too many times during a tournament. It's like: 'I better get my stuff together'."
There were no such alarms here. It was a surprisingly one-sided match, in which Bouchard made a litany of unforced errors as she failed to match Sharapova's power game. Bouchard's tactic is to meet the ball early with a short backswing, to take control of the point. Instead, she found herself a standing target for Sharapova's superior baseline hitting.
Essentially, you might say that Bouchard tried to play Sharapova at her own game, and was humbled. Sharapova broke twice in each set, winning more than 70 per cent of points on the Bouchard second serve.
The gulf was in quality, but in intensity, too. Bouchard may be a fighter, but Sharapova is a warrior, and that is something quite different. Meeting the ball with a fearsome battle cry and habitually finding the clean winner, Sharapova imposed herself on the game far more effectively, upsetting Bouchard's rhythm. By the end of this 78-minute drubbing, Bouchard almost looked pleased to be getting off the court.
"I felt under pressure the whole time," she said. "I didn't start well, and it all went downhill from there. I didn't feel like I was dominating the ball like I usually want to. That's what she [Sharapova] does well: she puts pressure on her opponents. That's why I made a few too many unforced errors today."
Bouchard is often described as a sort of Sharapova-lite. On one level, it makes sense: the blonde hair, the image empire, the endorsements, the single-minded focus, the simple refusal ever to accept a cause is lost. But Sharapova has something extra. She has a pathological fear of losing: not just a point, not just a game, not just a match, but everything. It is the sort of positive scarring that only years on the clock can bestow.
Bouchard is a fine player, a phenomenon of talent and desire and self-motivation. But no amount of hard work or goal-setting can reproduce the cold chill of fear. For Bouchard in the longer term, losing to a player like Sharapova is not the issue. What matters is how she reacts.
The Daily Telegraph