Rennae Stubbs criticised a key aspect of Iga Swiatek’s game but Andrea Petkovic disagrees.
The World number has endured a challenging start to her 2025 season and for the first time since 2020, she has reached the month of April without a title to her name.
Iga Swiatek is known for dominant and aggressive brand of tennis, which bewildered many of her opponents throughout the 2022 and 2023 campaigns.
But she has not lifted a trophy since the 2024 French Open, and Swiatek has not reached a final guiding Poland to the United Cup championship match.
What does Rennae Stubbs not like about Iga Swiatek’s serve?
Swiatek has not been able to assert the same dominance she had over the WTA Tour since winning her fourth French Open title in 2024.
In the process she lost the World number one ranking, but since then Swiatek hired a new coach and is working various aspects of her game to try and achieve more success.
The World number two’s serve is something that is a work in progress, but Rennae Stubbs gave a brutally honest opinion about it.
“This is my thing about Iga and it has been for a while. She is 5ft 10, 5ft 11. She should have a much better serve,” the Australian said on the Rennae Stubbs podcast.
“I absolutely hate her service motion. It is so discombobulated. It’s like she takes the arm there, then the foot comes way too much to the front of her body.
“She should be way more side on. She should have a lot more wrist snap. Her serve has not developed at all and it’s so predictable.”
Stubbs added: “Where she is getting hurt in matches now is that she is getting broken a lot and I think the predictability of her second serve is where it hurts her.
“She hits the same one over and over and she kind of refuses to change it up. I think it is very hard for her to change it up because of her motion and because it is so discombobulated.
“She has like three hitches, she is very front on, her ball toss is way too far to the right. There is a lot of things she could improve to get a better serve and get more free points on her serve and become more of a weapon.”
Andrea Petkovic disagrees with Rennae Stubs about Iga Swiatek’s serve
Despite Stubbs’ criticisms, Swiatek is winning 50.1% of her second serve points in 2025, the third-highest number out of the world’s top 20.
Andrea Petkovic was a guest on the Rennae Stubs podcast and she took a different point of view to the host regarding Swiatek’s serve, and accused her of being “unfair.”
“She was serving exclusively kick serves and now she also has the body serve,” she said. “Yes, she should be able to serve the slice serve but that is not fair to say that she has not developed her serve.
“She has worked on it so much that I think she gets confused on it sometimes. I called the match against Elena Svitolina and she had completely lost rhythm on her serve, but she was returning really well.
“Iga’s weapon was never her serve. It was her baseline game and return, that’s why she has never developed it. I agree she needs to develop it, and that is what they are doing.
“But it’s not fair to say she has a bad serve compared to Keys and Andreeva, whose weapon is the serve is and has been since they were 15.
“You have to compare to someone like Svitolina who never had a good serve and then came back from the baby break and all of a sudden could serve 120mph.”
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