Relaxed attitude mixed with killer instinct is Henin’s recipe for grand slam win
By ANIWednesday, January 27, 2010
SYDNEY - Justine Henin has revealed that she has become a much more relaxed tennis player than she was in the past, and the real challenge that lies before the seven-times grand slam winner is to reconcile her new easier-going self with the necessary killer instinct.
“I’m much more relaxed than I was in the past, that’s for sure. I hope it’s not only because it’s the beginning, and I’m not going to get crazy again in six months,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted her, as saying.
It is still honeymoon time for the divorcee who left the game in May 2008 with her competitive fire extinguished by the desire to discover the person beyond the tennis player, to learn about herself, having sucked all she needed from the game.
This is just the second tournament after her comeback and Henin has already noticed that she is expending less energy than before.
“In a grand slam, I was really in my bubble - now we just go forward. We try many, many different restaurants. I’m more open to a lot of things. That’s the way I have to keep going. To find the right moment to put the intensity and the concentration and to get away from that, it’s probably with the experience and the maturity we can get it. But that takes for me a little bit of time because it’s really new … it’s [a] very interesting experience for me this week,” she said
Henin is booked in for a semi-final tomorrow against unseeded Chinese Zheng Jie, having yesterday eliminated 19th seed Nadia Petrova in the first of her 10 matches this January played under the Australian sun.
Now she is within two matches of outdoing Clijsters by winning a major in just her second comeback tournament. Clijsters took three.
Australia, she said, was the ideal starting point for her second career, despite her mixed experiences in previous years.
“But I just keep positive things. When I come back here, I don’t feel anything negative. It’s only good things. I’m here again in the last four. It’s just much more than what I could expect, and the dream continues, yeah,” she said. (ANI)
