By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Friday September 11, 2020

As a former coach of Victoria Azarenka, Naomi Osaka’s coach Wim Fissette can certainly offer a thorough understand of the competitive mindset of his charge’s opponent in the US Open final.



But Fissette, who has also coached Kim Clijsters, Simona Halep and Angelique Kerber, says he doesn’t need to spend a lot of time “over coaching” Osaka, because he feels that she plays better by intuition.

“Of course, I know Vika's game pretty well,” he said. “But I do feel like it's finals of the US Open. It's all about, like, controlling the emotions and trying to play the best tennis at the right moment.”

It’s a credit to Fissette, who knows when to step back and not let his ego get in the way. And he certainly deserves to have an ego, given the success he has had throughout the last decade, coaching players to Grand Slam success.

He worked with Azarenka in 2015 and 2016, and she thought enough of him to bring him back in 2019. At the end of the season he parted ways with the Belarusian in order to begin his partnership with Osaka.

"I had been contacted by his entourage a few weeks ago when I was still with Azarenka," he said at the time. "Her manager wanted to know my plans. I spoke directly to Vika and seeing that her future was very uncertain, she will not play in Australia due to private problems, I accepted."

He believes that Osaka, a two-time champion already before she hired him to coach her earlier this season, has a knack for feeling her way through matches and problem solving her way out of trouble.

“Naomi is, for sure, a big-time intuition player who really follows her feelings on court,” said Fissette. “Of course, she goes on the court with, like, a game plan. But let's say that game plan is a little bit more basic than say I would coach Vika going into the match tomorrow. For me going into the match tomorrow, it's easier to over-coach Naomi than, like, maybe under-coach. I don't know if that's the right explanation. You understand me?”

Fissette says he will give Osaka three bullet points to keep in the back of her mind, but the rest is up to her. He’s got faith that it will be enough.

“I want to obviously give her three keys that is very important to me, but I will not go into detail into this match with Naomi because I feel also in the past she has shown she has a great intuition. I really trust that. The intuition is not like now I'm going to play this ball. She understands the game really well. It's not like that you program the computer: okay, you're going to play two balls there, the third one you always need to go there. It's more like on the feeling.”