"Take the ball earlier and make my game stronger" - Halep shares Mouratoglou's vision for her

The Romanian has chosen Patrick Mouratoglou as her new coach to get her back on the winning track in Grand Slams and to add more aggression to her game.

In an exclusive interview with the TennisMajors, Halep talked about her surprise partnering with Patrick Mouratoglou which left the world of tennis shocked. She spoke about what the vision is and how things will hopefully look moving forward.

Halep knows that she has one of the best attacking/defending balances on tour, which makes her a great clay-court player. But now in her thirties, and with the hard-hitting Iga Swiatek having just taken over as the world’s top women’s tennis player, she now wants to be “a bit more aggressive” on the court:

“I want to take the ball earlier. I want to open the court much better than I did before. I don’t say that I had a bad game before but I want to make it stronger. I would like to get stronger in the body as well, because to be offensive and to be close to the baseline, to play with the big hitters is not easy. So you have to be strong on the body. I will work on that, but also to open the court to use some angles a little bit better than before and actually to take the ball early. So that’s the goal in our vision.”

It doesn’t take much questioning to realise that a career Grand Slam, with at least one title at the Australian Open and US Open, is a driving force behind her revival. But her response shows that she still sees herself as a clay-court specialist who needs to convince herself of her legitimacy on fast surfaces:

“I love clay,” Halep says, “so that’s why I probably I was able to win many tournaments on clay [seven out of her 23 wins, including two in Madrid and one in Rome] and also the French Open [in 2018]. I won Wimbledon [in 2019], which I never expected because it’s super fast and you need the serve. So I don’t have a big serve there. But my game was really good in that year and it was just perfect for the surface and I was very confident.”