Meditations On A Beatdown: Petra Kvitova Def. No. 3 Caroline Wozniacki 6-2, 6-0

Suppose I told you that of the over 200 singles matches that have been played to completion at Wimbledon 2010 thus far, the quickest of them lasted only 46 minutes.

I'll ad that, unsurprisingly, the match was between a top five seed and a player outside the top 60.  It makes sense.  Matches between players that far apart in the rankings are often lopsided, especially in the early rounds.

To hear that this match took place on the second Monday of Wimbledon, in a fourth round match between two players who had each won three matches in the tournament to get to that point, is significantly more surprising.  Perhaps the lower-ranked player had snuck through a soft part of the draw, and received a harsh reality check once finally running into quality opposition.

When it's revealed that the winner of this match was the unseeded player, and it was the top five player who lost in record time, the story no longer seems plausible.

But that's just what happened on Day 7 of Wimbledon.  No. 3 Caroline Wozniacki was thoroughly embarrassed in her fourth round match on Court 2, losing to WTA No. 62 Petra Kvitova 6-2, 6-0 in only 46 minutes.

Wozniacki is a counter-puncher at best and can very accurately be called a pusher, but her play on Monday put even the most flagrant of pushers to shame.  Her strategy to simply get the ball back in play until an error came from her opponent may have worked in previous rounds, but against Kvitova it left her completely prone to repeated flogging. 

Wozniacki and Kvitova each hit 11 unforced errors, but Kvitova hit almost six times as many winners as did her much more highly ranked opponent, beating her in that crucial category by a 23 to 4 margin.

The statistics, brutal as they are, hardly do the massacre justice.

Dinara Safina and Ana Ivanovic (and to a lesser extent Svetlana Kuznetsova) have had more than their fair share of shocking departures at slams to unheralded opponents.  But they at least went down with a fight.  As the No. 1 seed at the 2009 US Open, Safina also lost to Kvitova, but she at least extended her loss into a third set tiebreak.

But Wozniacki, seeded as the third best player in the tournament, exited faster than any player had previously in over 200 matches.

Was Wozniacki's effort lacking? Given the scoreline of this match, it's impossible to argue that it wasn't.  It simply cannot be possible for a top five player to try her hardest throughout and win only five points in a set.

Next comes the question that crops up any time a highly ranked woman goes down in flames like this--does this loss reflect badly on women's tennis?

And because of the way Wozniacki lost, in this case I have to say that it does. 

Wozniacki did not play much differently from the way she normally does, the way that got her as high as No. 2 in the WTA rankings earlier this year.  Against most of her competition, simply hanging in a point until her opponent makes an error is enough to win, and win convincingly.  The majority of her opponents cannot hit the ball with the combination of power and consistency necessary to win a match against a solid defensive player. 

But Kvitova could, and to see her competence wreak such on Wozniacki was brutal to watch.

Wozniacki's complete inability to change her tactics mid-match was also disturbing.  Wozniacki has won seven titles on the WTA Tour in her young career, but each of them was at a tournament which allowed on-court coaching, a crutch allowed only at WTA Tour events (grand slams still do not allow for on-court coaching and hopefully never will). 

Stunningly (given what transpired today), Wozniacki even boasts a 2-0 career record against Kvitova at tournaments which allow coaching.

If she is ever going to win a grand slam, Wozniacki will need to learn to win matches on her own accord, not simply remain content to let inferior opponents beat themselves.  Wozniacki made the finals of the 2009 US Open and was thereby only a match away from winning a grand slam, but she made it to that final by beating Melanie Oudin in the quarterfinals and Yanina Wickmayer in the semifinals, a path of unseeded players unlikely to ever be rolled out for her again.

Kvitova faces a far less passive opponent in the next round in Estonian qualifier Kaia Kanepi.  Kanepi claimed a top-five scalp of her own in the first round, beating No. 5 Sam Stosur in straight sets. 

If Kvitova dominates Kanepi in the same way she dominated Wozniacki, I'll take back some of my criticisms.  Maybe Kvitova, despite being ranked No. 62, really is that good.  Maybe Kvitova deserves to be in the exclusive top five as well.

One thing I can say for sure--it sure does seem like they'll let in just about anybody these days.