Seoul Surge: How Coleman Wong Clinched Back-to-Back Semi-finals

This period of the season can often be seen as a time of opportunity for some of the players on tour. On the Challenger circuit it is much the same and Hong Kong's Coleman Wong appears to be enjoying his tennis at present. After reaching the final in Guangzhou last week, now Wong has backed that up with a semi-final showing in the Seoul Challenger after beating Sho Shimabukuro 7-6, 6-1.

I wrote a piece last week about how Wong was thriving in the super quick Guangzhou conditions, but it is like night and day in Seoul in terms of how much harder it is to finish points. Well, not to the same level anyway.

That point was proven with the amount of opportunities that both of these players were having on return of serve throughout a lot of this opening set. Wong was not able to be complacent with the first serve always buying him free points or the risk behind a serve-volley play being non-existent. He had to be a bit more wary and cautious versus Shimabukuro.

The serve-volley tactical plan was implemented quite a bit from Wong in Guangzhou, but here in Seoul it is clear that receivers have a little more time to react, and it can be observed in this next video. The Japanese utilises that extra reaction time to pick Wong off with a return winner in this scenario. It gave Wong some information that it could only be a sporadic tactical play today.

This is something that Wong generally executed to an exceptional standard despite the question marks in other areas of his game in this quarter-final. Aggressive intentions behind each and every return of serve no matter what.

Shimabukuro likes to dictates with flat groundstrokes and is hard to contain with a lot of time on the forehand side in particular. Wong did a good job of limiting this a lot. Wong needed to suppress the Japanese through being on the front foot early and that included in return points. In this next video you can see Wong with a forehand line-centre return of serve and it enables him to do damage off the next forehand that presents itself. This was only five games in but it was a regular theme.

There was already three breaks of serve within the first five games of this quarter-final. There was definitely more jeopardy for Wong in comparison to the week before in Guangzhou. Even more confirmation of that was when Coleman fails to serve the first set out and has to fight it out in a subsequent tiebreak. Wong successfully sets the tone in this tiebreak with his ability to be in control of real estate and hug the baseline for long periods.

The second huge point in terms of intentions from Wong came at *5-4 up in the first set tiebreak. Here the Japanese executes a very strong return of serve that essentially gives Wong no other choice than to improvise and work with the cards he has been dealt with. Even then it does not take too long for Wong to ease into a few steps closer to the top of the baseline and then the backhand down the line changes everything.

What I loved about this point is Wong's recognition of when to get to net. He could have risked approaching net following the forehand prior, then waited for the premium backhand down the line, acknowledging when the higher defensive ball was coming from Shimabukuro. This was such a great point.

Wong runs away with the match after getting through the tiebreak. He breaks in his very first return game of the second set and does not look back. Wong was still maintaining that extremely forceful returning intent and continued to take the ball on the rise. But on top of that, Wong was doing a good job of restricting the Japanese from profitable net ventures and frequent scenarios in the forecourt too.

Shimabukuro ends up double faulting on break point down to go down a double break and could never recover from that as Wong was performing way too well to give that enviable lead up.

Coleman Wong will now meet Australia's Omar Jasika in the Seoul Challenger semi-finals. Jasika is mostly known for being a former US Open juniors champion but has played a huge amount of his tennis at Challenger level during his career.

This will be a first meeting between the two. Jasika is looking to make his first Challenger final of the year, whereas it will potentially be a third for Wong in the same time frame.