Sara Errani serves up another tantalizing moment of tennis for Italy at the Billie Jean King Cup

MALAGA, Spain — Sara Errani stands on the baseline and exhales deeply. She is about to hit a second serve, with Italy on match point against Poland. A place in the final of the Billie Jean King Cup is at stake. So Errani does what she has done many times before: she hits an underarm serve.

The ball floats in the service box and on the racket of Iga Swiatek, one of two women’s players who can claim to be the best in the world. Swiatek realizes it in a flash and hits her return deep on Errani’s forehand. Errani once again does what she has done many times before: she gets the ball back.

She does the same on her opponent’s next shot, hoisting a backhand lob into the air. Swiatek makes a loop with a forehand volley and Italy is through to the final for the second year in a row.

Errani falls to the ground in relief, celebrates with her partner Jasmine Paolini, and seconds later shakes hands with the defeated opponents before allowing herself a ‘what-did-I-just-do’ smile.

For Errani, 37, it was another successful heist in a career full of them.

On Wednesday, she added a fourth Billie Jean King Cup title (three of which came at the Federation Cup) to the Golden Grand Slam doubles career she completed this year by winning gold alongside Paolini at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. It was a wonderful year for Errani, who also won the mixed doubles title at the US Open with another Italian, Andrea Vavassori. She thought 2024 would be her last tour after winning her last major a decade ago.

“My thought last year was to participate in the Olympics and then stop playing tennis, but we are playing great in doubles and I am having so much fun,” she said in an interview in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the WTA Tour. Final earlier this month.

By completing the Golden Slam doubles event in Paris, Errani entered an elite group of just seven women. Looking back on her career, Swiatek’s underarm serve on Monday will feel like a defining moment for a player who used the controversial tactic more consistently and specifically than anyone.

Her story with the underarm serve goes to the heart of her tennis life.

The underarm serve is one of the most peculiar shots in tennis, caught between the poles of disrespectful trick shot and tactical masterstroke. Big servers like Nick Kyrgios can use it to take advantage of opponents who are standing in the background waiting for a 230 km/h rocket. There is also an element of showmanship; this is very much the case with Alexander Bublik. He may be blessed with a great serve, but he is also the current player who is probably most synonymous with the brutal alternative.

Other players use it against specific opponents. World number 68 Alexandre Muller said The Athletics at Wimbledon that he had practiced the shot specifically to use it against Daniil Medvedev, who has one of the deepest positions in the sport.

Corentin Moutet, a master of the shot, started practicing forearm serves after a shoulder injury. He has since incorporated them into his game, which he did with great success at this year’s French Open. He used the forearm serve twelve times in his third round victory against Sebastian Ofner, winning nine of those points. He is the opposite of a player like Kyrgios, who uses the underarm serve because he does not expect to win free points after his first serve; there is no decrease in the expected value.

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Errani’s reason for using the shot will be familiar to many amateur players: she simply doesn’t trust her serve.

Errani is 164 cm tall, which is small by modern tennis standards, just like her partner Paolini, whose serve is quite spicy despite her height of 1.80 meters. Errani doesn’t have this pace, and her height has contributed to a shot that is often derided as the worst serve in the sport.

Smiling, she says it would be great to be a little bigger. “I often think about that.”

Rather than letting her become a complete albatross, Errani has used her ground skills, tactical knowledge and the shock factor of a serve that regularly registers around 96.5 km/h on the speed gun to reach the pinnacle of tennis in singles and doubles. .

She reached the 2012 French Open singles final and broke the world top five a year later, despite her opponents feeling like they had to break her every match. Instead, they are fooled by her incredible agility at the net or from the back of the court, and struggle to read and return her serve.

Sara Errani has struggled with regular duty throughout her career (Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images)

“It’s so slow and it’s kind of floating in the air,” Mirjana Lucic-Baroni said at a press conference after losing to Errani in the fourth round of the 2014 US Open, a match in which Errani’s average serve speed was 122 km/h .

“It was very difficult to time the balls.” Errani’s serve became something of a meme in 2024 after Daniil Medvedev completely failed to return it during a mixed doubles match at the Paris Olympics.

Errani herself said at a press conference after that match that she has a different approach to serving than most players: “I don’t try to make winners,” she said.

“I’m just trying to make a kick, make a slice, change my game. I have to start at the point where I want. So sometimes it is better for me not to serve so quickly, because if you serve quickly, the ball comes (back) faster.”

That belief has not always been there. Her serve hit a low point in April 2019, when she had only recently returned from a 10-month doping ban for taking letrozole, which was increased from the original two months by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Errani said she was “really disgusted” by the length of the ban, and said her case was the result of contamination after her mother, who was taking letrozole for breast cancer, dropped pills on their kitchen counter where they were preparing meals.

At the Copa Colsanitas in Bogota, Colombia, Errani committed 18 double faults per match in three consecutive matches (all of which she won) before hitting about half of her serves in a quarterfinal defeat to Astra Sharma. Later that year, at a low-level event in Asuncion, Paraguay, Errani took the nuclear option by serving forearm for the entire tournament. She reached the final and faced a huge amount of abuse on social media.

In response, she wrote on Instagram: “In Italy I keep getting insulted by many people, especially regarding my service.

“If you don’t like it, send a letter to the WTA asking them to change the rules about the serve or ask them to disqualify me for a bad serve. If you just have other problems with me instead, send a letter to Santa.

Five years later, she says her service completely overtook everything else.

“I couldn’t compete. I thought about my serve all the time,” she says.

“My coach said: ‘Do one tournament and just participate.’ It was to try to clear my mind of not the panic, but the difficult moments.”

Despite recovering from those yips, Errani suffered a service game nightmare at the 2020 French Open during a second-round loss to Kiki Bertens. Errani picked up two time violations on five broken ball throws and landed just one over-arm serve, with one attempt missing the baseline. When she served on the set, she was heartbroken.

“Sometimes it’s there and it can come out, but I try to keep it under control,” she says of the nerves that can grip her while serving.

“My serve was good during practice. But during matches I felt the blockage, the panic. I know it’s still there. It’s not like it used to be.”

Errani, an unwitting pioneer, can laugh at the fact that the underarm serve has come back into fashion in recent years, especially among men. “If it can be a good tactic, why not?” she laughs. Against Swiatek, the decision was more of a feeling.

“I informed Jasmine just after the first serve, so I just felt it and I just did it without thinking about it too much,” she said at a post-match press conference.

At 37 years old, Errani is the most experienced player on the Italian team, and as her teammates sang during the festive press conference on Wednesday, she is “the brains of the team”.

Errani resembles her compatriot Jorginho, the Brazilian-born midfielder for Italy and Arsenal, who is so intelligent that he is a point of reference for everyone else, despite not being the most physically gifted.

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Paolini, the world number four in singles and a two-time Grand Slam finalist this year, constantly looks to Errani for guidance in doubles.

“She wants me to tell her what to do at every point. Even when she’s serving, she likes me to tell her where to put it and I try to get her to tell me what else she’s feeling,” Errani said.

Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini have formed a formidable doubles partnership. (Robert Prange/Getty Images)

Whatever the tactics, the partnership between Errani and Paolini contributes to a golden period for tennis in Italy.

Among the men, Jannik Sinner is number 1 in the world and has won two Grand Slams this year. He is part of an Italian team hoping to defend the Davis Cup this week and make it a double with the victorious BJK Cup group. Errani, who went through a period where she was one of the ‘Fab Four’ Italian women who all reached a Grand Slam final and the world top 10 between 2010 and 2014 (Francesca Schiavone, Roberta Vinci and Flavia Pennetta were the others) , believes that all of her country’s current top players are pushing each other to greater heights.

And Errani has no desire to leave the golden age behind him yet. “I said to Jasmine, ‘I’ll definitely continue next year and we’ll see,’” she says.

After the genre-defining forearm serve against Swiatek, this crafty veteran has at least one last heist left in him.

(Top photo: Fran Santiago/Getty Images for ITF)