Sania has been found wanting: Piperno

August 10, 2006

After a little over a year on the WTA circuit, world No. 44 Sania Mirza's game has been sorted out by coaches and players and the Indian has been found wanting. Sania, who can hit a forehand as good as anybody in the game needs to buck-up on her serve and move faster on court, according to India's Fed Cup captain Enrico Piperno.

One of the players who clinically ripped apart Sania's game, Piperno said, was Australia's Samantha Stosur. Sania was beaten 4-6 2-6 by Stosur during India's World Group II Playoff of the Fed Cup in April-May this year. Piperno said that Stosur kept the ball away from Sania's strong forehand and rendered ineffective the Indian's power-packed game.

"I think Sania has the potential to break into the top-20," he said. But Piperno opined that Sania will have to give her game a new dimension. "Sania's game is very instinctive. Very much like Leander Paes'. You could give Leander a strategy and he would follow it for the first two points against his opponent but would then start playing a game that he was most comfortable with. She is instinctive and it works for her at times," Piperno said at a seminar organized by the Sports Journalists Federation of India.

Piperno, who first saw Sania as a 14-year-old, said that she was also paying the price of not working hard enough on improving her serve. "I had told her parents that she must try and improve her serve, but nothing much as happened on that front," the Fed Cup coach said. Piperno was also critical of Sania adding Asif Ismail and Narendranath, one of her first coaches, as part of her entourage.

"Sania may be comfortable with them. She wants to have someone with who she can hit balls for practice while on the tour. But I think she should have stuck with somebody like John Farington. She needs a coach she can look up to and a coach who can teach her how to construct a point and add dimensions to her game," Piperno said.