Li Na Upsets Caroline Wozniacki in Australian Open Semifinal: In-Depth Analysis

Li Na shrugged off early mishaps to dump world No. 1 and top seed Caroline Wozniacki out of the Australian Open and book her place in Saturday's final with Kim Clijsters.

Already the most successful Chinese tennis player ever, Li took another step to tennis history with her 3-6, 7-5, 6-3 victory in Melbourne.

Li had to save a match point at 4-5 in the second set and then she never looked back, displaying the ruthless power forehand that had inexplicably gone astray in the opening set.

Here's an in-depth analysis into the Wozniacki postmortem. For an excellent article on the rising star that is Li Na, B/R featured columnist Cliff Potter wrote an excellent piece today after her victory. You can read it here.

First Set

Wozniacki was her usual unspectacularly efficient self in the first set. She dominated points on her first serve and essentially sat back as Li beat herself with an array of errors from the back of the court.

I don't think Wozniacki came into this match with a game plan to attack the Li forehand, but as soon as it became evident that she was struggling to control her baseline ground strokes, Wozniacki went after the forehand with calm zeal.

As you can see from the graphic below, Wozniacki served to the Na forehand almost in isolation, only going out wide to the backhand in the ad court where Li couldn't do as much damage.

Li tried to attack those second serves by stepping inside the baseline, but everything was flying long off her racket in the heat of the day.

Li did hit winners as she has done throughout the tournament, but the problem was the unforced errors. The official count was 17, and they were spread out. The red dots on the graphic below right show the forehand errors, while the backhand mistakes are highlighted by black dots.

There really was no consistency to her game, and even though she hit a few beautiful passing shots down the line (red lines are forehand winners on the graphic below left), she was hitting way too flat and, ultimately, just too wild.

Second Set

The middle set featured more of the same from Li Na and a more aggressive Wozniacki. The Dane came out of the blocks hot, but errors started to creep into her game as Li started to find her range.

Wozniacki continued to serve solely to the forehand on first serves as she had done in the first set, but the placement wasn't as deep and the more Na started to time the ball and add more topspin, the more dangerous she looked.

Aside from the fact that Wozniacki played the big points in this second set passively, there were two bigger problems for her to deal with.

• The first was her consistency. A strength all tournament, her baseline game fell apart when Li hit flat balls down the center of the court and did not provide Wozniacki a angle to hit from. The Dane did a great job of absorbing the power strokes in the opening set, but the most basic part of her game left her when she needed it most. The graphic below tells the tale of the Wozniacki unforced errors, with the red dots illustrating forehand misses.

• The second problem was that Li was in an almost all-or-nothing situation, especially down 4-2. She hit a ton of winners in this set, 20 in total, from all angles of the baseline. She was especially effective with her double-handed backhand down the line from the back of the court and from her forehand side, when she had time to run around a looped return and take it on the drive volley from the middle of the court. The placement to the corners was so good that there were times when Wozniacki didn't even try to scramble. How often do we say that about her? Almost never.

Third Set

So, a place in the final came down to a single-set shootout. Wozniacki wasn't as dominant on her serve, especially her second serve, and Li did a little bit of a better job when she was forced to slice in something offspeed.

Wozniacki lost the ability to hit through Na, but the Chinese star kept on slugging away at Wozniacki's forehand. She kept going for her backhand down the line, but instead of going down the line with the forehand, too, Li mixed it up by going cross court time and time again.

This served three purposes:

1. Wozniacki was anticipating Li's ground strokes extremely well, so by going cross court when Wozniacki expected another shot to her backhand, it kept her off balance.
2. It gave Li more margin of error, shooting into the wide open court instead of having to thread the needle.
3. It allowed her to hit the ball flat over the lowest part of the net. The ESPN crew had a great stat saying that Li's shots cleared the nets by less distance than any of the last eight in the draw (men and women). By going crosscourt, she could hit the ball harder and flatter without needing spin to bring it back into the court.

Here's a shot pattern of her winners from that third set.

Wozniacki might have just blown her best chance to win a Grand Slam, but take nothing away from Li Na. She found a way to break Wozniacki down and, at the end of the day, she found a way to win by staying true to her game.

She will make errors against Clijsters in the final, but it could be a duel as both players have a tailor-made game for these hard courts.

Everyone is picking Clijsters to win, but if Li comes out and avoids the mistakes she made in the first set against Wozniacki, I've got a feeling it will be Li celebrating the victory.