Fissette: Clay is perfect for developing Osaka's game

“I’m embracing it (clay) a lot more now,” she told reporters at her next tournament in Madrid.

“I feel like there’s definitely beauty to it. I’m taking a lot of inspiration from people that do very well here. I’m not expecting to be like, Iga (Swiatek), or something, but I just want to do the best with what I have.”

Swiatek, a three-time Roland-Garros champion and by far the tour’s most prolific clay-court player, happens to be Osaka’s next opponent on Paris’ terre battue.

The Polish top seed is also a player Osaka has drawn inspiration from during her comeback from maternity leave, watching many of her matches on television and studying her game on the surface.

It is just one of several ways Osaka is using to gain an edge, as she attempts to recapture the form that has earned her four Grand Slam titles between 2018 and 2021.

>> WHAT WE LEARNED FROM OSAKA'S R1 VICTORY

She started this season with a new fitness trainer, Florian Zitzelsberger, and also hired a movement coach, Simone Elliott, who is a former ballerina and the wife of Zitzelsberger.

Osaka’s Belgian coach, Wim Fissette, believes his charge has made lots of improvement when it comes to her movement and is “super happy with the process” so far these past five months.

“The idea (of hiring a movement coach) came from Flo,” Fissette told rolandgarros.com in Madrid.

“She has helped other players on the tour, she’s amazing at what she does. She’s a really great person to have on the team.

“Naomi’s flexibility is better, her range of movement is getting better, and she’s getting stronger on the reach, just because she’s more flexible, I think. Apparently Novak Djokovic is also working with people like that. It’s just about working on every part of her body and her game.”

Osaka believes Zitzelsberger and Elliott have helped her a great deal, not just with movement, but also with injury prevention, and feels she has made significant steps forward with each match and tournament she has played.

Before the start of Madrid, Osaka played, and lost, a practice set against Daria Kasatkina.

“It was really bad on my part. She killed me, it was like 6-1,” reflected Osaka.

“I think every day I made it a goal to improve from that, and I really think I did. There’s just so much I have to learn on clay. Wim said I have a lot of catching up to do. For me, I’m a very impatient person so hopefully that catching up comes along quickly.”

Osaka defeated Kasatkina at her very next tournament in Rome, where she picked up three consecutive wins before falling in the round of 16 to Qinwen Zheng.

Fissette acknowledges that Osaka has far less experience on clay compared to hard courts, where she has enjoyed the most success in her career so far. He is tempering expectations during this swing, while also making sure Osaka is making the most of her time on the red dirt, and capitalising on any learning opportunities.

“It’s been a long time since she played on the clay and it’s been a very, very long time since she was successful on the clay, so we cannot expect miracles. We might hope for them but we have to be realistic,” he said in the Spanish capital.

“It’s just experience and time spent on the clay. It is different (as a surface), you need to make some tactical adjustments. Of course, the movement is different, the ball bounces, it’s a higher contact. So of course there are differences.

“But if you just think about the last five years, how many hours has she spent on the clay and how many matches has she played on the clay? And therefore what I’ve seen so far has been very promising.”

What has impressed Fissette the most so far during this second chapter of Osaka’s career is her commitment to the process.

“She’s so far been unbelievably committed to what she wants to do. She wants to become the best version of herself, and she’s 100 per cent investing energy and time, and she’s watching for every detail in her job, so I’m very happy with that,” he explained.

While many players try to make too many changes to their game to adjust to a certain surface, Osaka says the key for her on clay is to find a balance between adapting and sticking to her bread and butter.

“I think I want to adapt and I’m trying to adapt but there are things that obviously work for me and they’ve gotten me to where I am so I don’t want to suddenly start slicing and dicing,” she said.

“I think there’s a basis of my game and I want to stick to that but also respect the court. That’s something that’s a work in progress for me. I’m watching a lot more matches on clay, I’m trying to do my homework as best as I can.”

For Fissette, this clay campaign has been tremendously important for the development of Osaka’s game overall. Instead of viewing the clay and grass swings as building blocks towards the North American hard-court season, he sees them as a chance to make significant gains as her comeback continues.

“For me it’s like the perfect thing to develop her game. She is already learning so much that she will use on the hard courts as well, and on the grass, it’s going to be the same,” he said.

“For young players, playing on different surfaces is where they develop because they’re challenged, they need to find solutions. They need to find other things and that’s how you become a better player.”