People have their feel-good places: for some it’s the South Seas beach, for others the sofa landscape, and with Jule Niemeier it seems reasonable to assume that red sand is one of her favorite terrains. Courts with brick dust, she said this week, are what she particularly likes as a tennis player: “Here in Europe we grew up on sand.” It was therefore a clever, cunning decision by team captain Rainer Schüttler to nominate Jule Niemeier, 23, as the soloist for the third match in the Billie Jean King Cup against Brazil. Because the statistics spoke against them: Niemeier had only won two out of 13 tennis games since the beginning of the year. A poor rate – but what are numbers compared to feeling?
It was 1-1 after two individuals when Jule Niemeier from Dortmund, number 65 in the world rankings, took on Brazil’s best, Beatriz Haddad Maia, in the country duel in Stuttgart on Saturday. Three exhausting, exhausting hours later she had defeated the favourite, the fourteenth in the world rankings, with boom, overview and whipping forehand punches 7: 6 (3), 3: 6, 6: 2. The first set alone lasted almost 80 minutes.
“An important match for me, for the team and also for the country,” she said afterwards, relieved and almost in tears, and this exhaustive summary endured: her colleague Anna-Lena Friedsam, 29, built the lead that Niemeier had achieved then out, 6-1, 6-0 against Brazil’s number two, Laura Pigossi. This meant that the final double could be omitted. The DTB qualified 3-1 against Brazil for the final round of the national tennis competition in November.
“It was a golden day,” said Friedsam on the pitch. Above all, Captain Schüttler showed a sensitive hand in the nomination. Schüttler had bet on three soloists with different playing systems; This tactic, Anna Lena Friedsam found, worked brilliantly with three individual victories: “We are a great team and quite broadly positioned as a team.” She narrowly lost the opening match on Friday against Haddad Maia in three sets; the next day she went on the offensive from the start with powerful attacking shots and longline balls on the pitch.
A selfie with happy German winners in Stuttgart.
(Photo: Paul Zimmer/Imago)
Tatjana Maria, on the other hand, last year’s Wimbledon semi-finalist and the third in the group, maintains a more delicate style: with a lot of slice, with balls that the 35-year-old circles in the corners. She only flew from Bogotà on Monday from her tournament victory, won her marathon match against the lively Pigossi in Stuttgart on Friday – and was then allowed to pause after the exertion of the journey because Niemeier took her place. Schüttler was particularly impressed by the fact that the youngest conquered all adversities, the bad match rate, the nervousness, the quiet self-doubt. “I can’t say whether that’s the turning point,” confessed Niemeier, Wimbledon quarter-finalist in 2022, “but if I play like today, it’s okay.”
The German players can stay in Stuttgart, where one of the best endowed women’s tournaments will take place next week.
The weekend in Stuttgart also brought Niemeier, Maria and Friedsam an ideal win: a starting advantage for the well-rewarded Grand Prix tournament next week, where the winner can win a pretty six-figure sum plus a stylish sports car. The game is then played on the same court, in the same hall, and there it can only be an advantage to have sufficiently tried out the slip properties of the sand surface in matches lasting several hours under competitive conditions. Especially since the German Tennis Association even fulfilled the ball request of the national players at the Billie Jean King Cup and provided products from the same manufacturer that also supplies the Grand Prix (i.e. the event of another organizer), as Association President Dietloff von Arnim explained. “A perfect set-up for us,” praised Schüttler.
Nevertheless, the DTB now wants to reconsider the Swabian double event concept. The “success model of earlier days”, according to Arnim, which had proven itself in the days of Angelique Kerber around 2018, is no longer attractive – at least from the DTB point of view it does not attract enough audience for the national competition. The 1,800 spectators who were spread out in the large arena on Saturday loudly drummed on Niemeier’s team, but according to Arnim, the capacity utilization was “not satisfactory”. In the hall next door, the qualifying matches for the Porsche Grand Prix were already underway – so to speak, competition next door.
So it continues on red sand, in the feel-good landscape for Niemeier and colleagues.