Diana Shnaider denied Donna Vekic her first trophy of 2024 at the Bad Homburg Open, winning her third trophy of the year.
The former Top 20 player was always a very good player on grass, where her skillset thrives. She has a powerful serve and hits the ball well for the most part, which is all a player usually needs to be very good on grass.
Vekic had a vintage performance this week, beating some very good players, such as Ekaterina Alexandrova, to reach the final at the WTA 500 tournament in the German city.
In the final, the Croatian faced Russian Diana Shnaider, who has been playing really well for a few months already. She's still a fairly young player, but we've seen her beat good opponents already.
This week was hugely impressive and resilient from her as she won her final two matches in three sets. The Russian started better after taking an early break, but soon after that, she started having some trouble.
Vekic is not unfamiliar to a slow start, and she looked better as the match went on. One problem she had was outlasting the Russian, who had no issues with grinding points.
She needed to do that a lot in the final few games of the opening set, which she took 6-3. However, Vekic's second set was flawless. She was hitting the ball really well, and after taking an early break, things were simple for her.
There were no break chances for Shnaider after dropping her serve as Vekic added another break to win the second set 6-2 and take the match into the decider.
The final set was, in many ways, similar to the first. Shnaider broke first but then got broken herself. After that, the resilient Russian kept applying pressure, and Vekic simply ran out of steam, losing the match 3-6, 6-2, 3-6.
After the match, Shnaider, who won her second Tour-level title, and third overall in 2024, was in a very good mood, making fun of the trophy, which was an elephant, saying all of her trophies won this year were animals.
"I'm going to have a zoo this year. I have a gorilla, I have a whale, now I have an elephant. Thank you for these trophies."