Sascha Bajin, for seven years a hitting partner for Serena Williams, is the sort of tennis insider who brings weight to any conversation and, in guiding the career of Naomi Osaka, he has moved from one legend to someone who may become one herself.
Osaka, who will forever be remembered for her calm when Williams self-destructed across the net from her in the 2018 US Open final, takes another step on that journey on Saturday and Bajin thinks the self-possession and focus he saw in New York will serve her well again in the Australian Open final against Petra Kvitova, who brings her own fairytale.
“I want her to approach the match like she approached [Karolina] Pliskova,” the coach said, in reference to the way Osaka survived a strong fightback to break down the cultured resistance of the Czech in the semi-final, after Pliskova had taken out Williams in the quarters.
“Petra’s also a big server but the opposite, because she’s a lefty. Same mindset though.”
Bajin was a fringe player who became an excellent coach and he lifted an eyebrow when it was suggested he was reversing a trend in the sport for “super-coaches” – former players such as Ivan Lendl and Stefan Edberg.
“They were incredible players. I have nothing but the utmost respect for them,” he said. “But I do believe if you’re a player you have to be very selfish and you have to be very selfish for a very long time.
“Some players, if they do want to start coaching, they find it hard to dedicate their life, schedule and everything for someone else. Maybe that’s a difficult process for them, I don’t know.
“I’m just happy I’m being successful with Naomi.”
He has a variety of performances by Osaka on which to draw in planning a strategy for the final. She has not been perfect but she has been resilient, and she will need that on Saturday.
“The Su-wei [Hsieh] match [which Osaka won after dropping the first set in the third round], she was down so much and came back. I think that took incredible effort. It took something else then against [Elina] Svitolina [in 72 minutes in the quarters]. She played so good.”
The unknown for both finalists is how they will respond to an opponent they have never played before, and how quickly they begin to read the good and bad signals in the early moments.
Bajin said: “Both of them are very dangerous off the first two, three shots, but I believe once the rally keeps going Naomi, with her current state of mind and physique, has the upper hand.
“I personally like the matches where things don’t go so well and she ends up winning. But you’d have to ask Naomi. I think she can rate her matches better than I can from the outside.”
There was no opportunity to ask Naomi, because she chose not to talk to the media before the final – which is her prerogative, but it does suggest her growing fame might be an issue. Bajin denies that. “She’s the same girl she was a year ago.”
Osaka does have the most engaging personality but she does not have much time for small talk, finding some of the on-court post-match interviews, for instance, an inconvenience.
In one exchange last week she politely interrupted her TV interrogator to inform him she’d rather be going, as it was very hot and she wanted to get out of the sun and into the locker room. Earlier, she set some sensitive souls in the media room back on their heels when she said it was odd talking to them about mundane things, “because you’re not real people”.
But Osaka is very much for real, as Kvitova realises. While the 21-year-old Japanese player with the Boca Raton twang and the beguiling innocence has the weight of two countries on her shoulders (and had to endure being depicted in “white-washed” form in an anime-style cartoon in a Japanese advert last week), Kvitova, a two-times Wimbledon champion, brings the oft-told story of how she was knifed and robbed in her apartment in Prostejov just before Christmas in 2016.
It could have ended her career – or worse – but she has put it behind her.
As for the final, she would only say: “Naomi is on fire. She’s an aggressive player, which I am as well. I think it will be about who’s going to take the first point and push the other a little bit.”
