Marketa's service has on one side (often) a very good long-axis pronation as well as an excellent head stability and eye control of the impact zone, but on the other side, it suffers from a rather extremely high toss, which leads to a limited body energy dynamic of the stroke...
Then over the years, the forehand has brought Petra some winners, but often also rather a quite serious amount of errors as some of the Forehand 3.0 principles have been often missing in her game. It was the reason why I have repeatedly criticized her forehand, (also) here on this site, in the past and why I have mentioned some hints towards possible improvements, also to Petra's surrounding, mainly since the later part of the 2015 season. It might be just a pure coincidence, but especially after...
In general, being able to hit the return either in the open stance or with the stepping in leads mostly to a much more dominant return with body energy involvement than stepping across, which mostly blocks a significant amount of the body energy. The ability to dominate a high amount of the returns from the outside leg (also on the forehand side) is one of the key elements in the game of the very top players. It brings, besides the already mentioned body energy dominance, also....
Petra's favorite strokes are the service and the backhand, which is a great combination for her as a left-handed player. Her forehand is a bit mistake prone, as I did write about it in one of the previous articles here. Below, I am showing some important details from Petra's dominant service through the years, from her so far the most successful 2011 season and then some rather recent ones. And there are some developments to be spotted...
This former top 10 player in both singles and doubles as well as twice Davis Cup Champion with the team of the Czech Republic belongs to the best servers on the Tour from the technical point of view. Despite his just average body size of 185cm (6'1''), he has a quite high career ace probability of 51% per game played.
