Andrea Petkovic sees Eva Lys as a possible top player. Lys had recently nurtured the hopes of German women’s tennis in Australia.
Andrea Petkovic believes tennis hopeful Eva Lys can make the leap to the top of the world. “I think she can go very far because she plays modern tennis,” former top player Petkovic told the SID on the sidelines of a sponsorship appointment before the WTA tournament in Hamburg in July: ”She plays fast, takes the ball early, is aggressive and returns well – you need all these things to survive and she has them. Sky is the limit.”
Lys caused a sensation at the Australian Open with her surprising run to the third round. As world number 70, she is currently the number one in German women’s tennis. She will also lead the DTB team against the Netherlands and Great Britain in the group stage of the Billie Jean King Cup next week.
“She’s only 23 years old. With her autoimmune disease, she has to pay much more attention to her body, so her development may not be quite as fast, but in Australia she showed what she’s capable of,” said Petkovic. Lys, who is from Hamburg, suffers from a rheumatic disease (spondyloarthritis) that was diagnosed in her a few years ago.
Despite the lack of a top player, Petkovic also sees the development in German women’s tennis as a whole in a positive light. “It’s always difficult when a strong generation is gone, then sometimes there’s a bit of chaos. But the German girls are doing really well,” said the Darmstadt native. She added that with national coach Torben Beltz, they have a “great man in their own ranks who is very close to all the players” and is driving development forward.
DTB President Dietloff von Arnim was a little more reserved in his comments to SID. “We can’t be completely satisfied. There is a nice saying that ‘the world rankings don’t lie’; and we would like to see the German players doing better,” said the official in Hamburg, but he emphasized the potential within their own ranks: ‘We have a lot of promising talent,’ said von Arnim.
