Coup Droit wrote:

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I must have really seen her on a weird day. I'd be wondering if I was having a senile moment but I actually made notes about the matches saw (sad, I know), and watched a lot of that match - the crowd was actually really noisy and into it because it was great fun to watch.
I'm not surprised though that it's not her normal game - some of it was quite suicidal! She's probably back to her favourite clay style now, having had 'her day' of grass stuff.

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I'm glad the Optimist saw the match against Amanda the same way as me but I don't think that means you were seeing things - it's more than plausible that she had a game plan worked out for grass and had been working on volleying, etc, but still decided to play it safe for her first match, especially when Amanda started playing clay court style tennis and she knew she had the beating of her like that.

You still got 40 points for a QR1 win then, so it would have been really important to her to make sure she got them, but she wouldn't have been favourite to win her QR2 match (let alone qualify), so having bagged the 40 points, why not throw caution to the win and give her nascent grass court game a go.

I wondered if she might even have done that in the 2nd set against Amanda (which I hardly saw any of, maybe the Optimist did) and that was why it was closer, i.e. maybe she got a set in front and had a go at a new style in the 2nd confident that she could revert in the 3rd and win that if it all went wrong. If not, maybe Amanda simply played a lot better in the 2nd set.