Injured Andreescu: “I Heard my Knee Crack”

Canada’s Bianca Andreescu will undergo medical examinations to determine the severity of the left knee injury that she suffered on Wednesday while facing Karolina Pliskova in round robin action at the Shiseido WTA Finals in Shenzhen."We'll see," she told reporters. "I'm getting an MRI tomorrow–hopefully it's nothing too bad."The Canadian injured the knee when landing awkwardly during a service return in the third game of the match and elected to retire from the contest at the conclusion of the second set."I heard my knee crack," she said. "It kind of went inwards and putting pressure afterwards on it really bothered me. I could barely bend my knee."

'I heard my knee crack.'@BAndreescu_ speaks about her injury at the @WTAFinals pic.twitter.com/zC1UuzWgtm

— WTA (@WTA) October 30, 2019

Desperate to make a good showing at her WTA Finals debut, Andreescu said the decision to retire was not an easy one."At some point an athlete just has to say stop and listen to their body and that's what I did," she said. "It's disappointing because this is the last tournament of the year, you want to go all out, you're playing at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, too, so it's not easy." But Andreescu and her team have learned the hard way to be careful with her health. When she pushed too hard in March and played the Miami Open with an aching shoulder, she ended up doing significant damage and hardly played for the next five months.Her coach Sylvain Bruneau told reporters this tournament that the team has learned a lot from the trials and tribulations that they faced this year.“We're going to go about scheduling differently next year than what we did this year,” he said. “The start of the year this year, it was just a match after another after another after another. I think there was a bit of probably too much volume.”Andreescu said her team was happy that the played it safe on Wednesday.“My team said no. It was good that I stopped,” she said.Andreescu will reportedly decide on Thursday whether she can play her final scheduled match at Shenzhen. Given her history and the lessons learned in 2019, it seems unlikely that she’d play with no chance of reaching the semifinals. But she may just want to finish the season on her terms."Who knows if I can play," she said. "We'll see."No matter what happens, we should expect to see Andreescu, when healthy, fighting for the sports biggest titles for years to come.“It's a long season,” she said. “It's not easy day in, day out. But I love doing this, so I'm just going to keep fighting.”