Articles by Steve Tignor

Week in Preview: Medvedev, Sabalenka lead fields in Rotterdam, Doha

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 21:02:00 +0000

After six weeks of the bubble life, tennis is finally ready to leave the relatively safe confines of Australia and take its chances on the road again. Suddenly the tour schedules are beginning to look familiar again. The men are in Rotterdam and Buenos Aires this week, while the top women gather for the first leg of the WTA’s desert double in Doha. Someday, hopefully soon, fans will follow.

ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament (ATP)

Rotterdam, Netherlands

$1,500,000; ATP 500

Indoor hard court

Draw is here

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You might think a 500-level draw that lost Rafael Nadal to a bad back would be devastated, but Rotterdam still has a loaded look to it. A futuristic one, too. With Daniil Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev, Andrey Rublev and Felix Auger-Aliassime among the Top 8 seeds, this could be a sneak preview of what the Grand Slams will look like if and when the Big 3 ever exit the stage.

Of those Top 8, I’ll be most curious about Medvedev. Will he gain momentum from reaching the Australian Open final, or will his disappointing performance in that match set him back?

First-round matches to watch: Auger-Aliassime vs. Kei Nishikori; Andy Murray vs. Robin Haase; Stan Wawrinka vs. Karen Khachanov.

Qatar Total Open (WTA)

Doha, Qatar

$565,000; WTA 500

Hard court

Draw is here

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The WTA returns to the Arabian peninsula for two events, in Doha and Dubai. Of the two, Doha, with a 28-player draw and a modest purse, is the smaller tournament this year. But in some ways that works to its advantage. With a strong, compact field, the good matches can start right away.

And the Qatar Total Open has a strong field. Elina Svitolina, Karolina Pliskova, Aryna Sabalenka, Petra Kvitova, Jen Brady, and Victoria Azarenka are among the Top 8 seeds. Garbiñe Muguruza, Anett Kontaveit, Angelique Kerber, Jelena Ostapenko, Elena Rybakina, Madison Keys, Ons Jabeur, Maria Sakkari, Amanda Anisimova, and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova are among those not seeded. There’s no time to work your way into this one.

Who’s a player to watch? I’ll be interested to see how Sabalenka does in defending her title from 2020. How Muguruza bounces back after playing so well yet ultimately losing to Naomi Osaka in Melbourne. And how Rybakina, whose career had been taking off before the lockdowns, does now that the tour is back in something close to full swing.

First-round matches to watch: Azarenka vs. Svetlana Kuznetsova; Keys vs. Belinda Bencic; Brady vs. Kontaveit; Ostapenko vs. Kiki Bertens.

Argentina Open (ATP)

Buenos Aires

$411,940; ATP 250

Red clay

Draw is here

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Diego Schwartzman is the top seed, but is he the hometown favorite this year? For the moment, he may have to cede that status to his countryman Juan Manual Cerundolo, who spent the past week reaching the final of the Cordoba Open in his first career main-draw appearance. The world No. 335 will try to continue that run of stunning form against yet another Argentine, Federico Delbonis, in his first round in Buenos Aires.

The ATP’s Golden Swing tends to produce these types of minor miracles: Last year Pedro Sousa made the final in Buenos Aires as a lucky loser, and two years ago Laslo Djere won his first title in Rio de Janeiro. In 2021 some of the players to watch will be No. 2 seed Cristian Garin; No. 5 Albert Ramos-Viñolas, who made the final in Cordoba; No. 8 Frances Tiafoe, the lone American to try his luck on the South American dirt this year; and Brazil’s Thiago Monteiro, a lefty clay lover who has made solid strides in the last two years.

Open 6ème Sens Metropole de Lyon (WTA)

Lyon, France

$235,238; WTA 250

Indoor hard court

Draw is here

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As a 250, this is the week’s secondary WTA tournament. These days, though, players are happy to have a chance to compete anywhere they can, and Lyon has attracted a good crowd. Ekaterina Alexandrova, Fiona Ferro, Caroline Garcia, and Kiki Mladenovic are the Top 4 seeds.

First-round match to watch: Alexandrova vs. 18-year-old Danish up-and-comer Clara Tauson.

Weekend Review: Swiatek accomplishes first goal of 2021 in Adelaide

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:10:00 +0000

“I’ve never actually experienced playing a final with a full stadium,” Iga Swiatek said after her 6-2, 6-2 win over Belinda Bencic in the final of the Adelaide International on Saturday.

By now, the pandemic has gone on long enough that it’s the packed arenas, rather than the empty ones, that seem weird for the players. That goes double for someone as young as Swiatek. The 19-year-old Warsaw native won her only other title inside a mostly deserted Court Philippe Chatrier at Roland Garros last year. But she didn’t seem to have any trouble adjusting to the energy that the Australian spectators brought to the court this weekend. According to Swiatek, the noisier they became as the match went on, the more confident she was that she was destined to win it.

“Especially on the changeovers, when I heard all the fans screaming, I felt in my body that the match is going to come to an end,” Swiatek said. “I was just trying to cool down and just do the same as I was doing.”

The presence of fans wasn’t the only difference between Swiatek’s two triumphs. In Paris, she played on her favorite surface, clay, and on the game’s biggest stage, a Grand Slam final. In Adelaide, she played on hard courts, in a mid-level WTA event. While her second title obviously doesn’t have the prestige of her first, Swiatek treated it as a test of almost equal importance. Yes, she wants to win the big ones, but she wants to win the small ones, too.

“It was my goal from the beginning of the season. I want to be, like, more consistent player, just play good week by week,” Swiatek said.

“It’s good for me because I can see that I can play good tennis for the whole week. It wasn’t like one time during the French Open. It gives me more confidence that I’m, like, more developed player and I can play good more often. I’m really happy about that.”

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There were differences between Paris and Adelaide, but there was also one overarching similarity: Swiatek dominated from start to finish, in the rallies and on the scoreline. She didn’t drop a set in seven matches at Roland Garros, and she didn’t drop one in five matches this week. Both times she deluged her opponents with a relentless, unpredictable, forward-surging attack.

“I never knew where she's going to play,” a beleaguered Bencic said after the 66-minute final. “She played, yeah, like it was overwhelming for me.”

Swiatek says she is trying to play closer to the baseline on hard courts, and she didn’t give up any ground, or face any break points, against Bencic. On her serve, Swiatek used the wide slice in the deuce court and followed it, as often as not, with a winning forehand. On her return, she stood in and took full cuts at first and second serves; even when she missed, Swiatek didn’t back off or go for less. From the baseline, Swiatek won points with straightforward crosscourt forehands, but also by going behind and wrong-footing Bencic. And when she had a chance at a putaway, she took it with gusto. On one short forehand, Swiatek raced in from the back of the court, took a running leap as the ball reached its peak, and swiped it away for a winner. Like her friend Naomi Osaka, Swiatek hits the ball hard enough that she doesn’t need to aim it near the lines.

“I think she has a really big game,” Bencic said. “It’s very unique. I struggled a lot today with how different she played. I just couldn’t figure out, like, her patterns or her serve or anything at all.”

If Swiatek felt any nerves trying to cross the finish line, she didn’t show them. Once she had the lead, she swung more freely and went for winners even earlier. How to handle those close-out nerves is something that Swiatek and her mental coach, Daria Abramowicz, have talked about, seemingly with instructive results. According to Swiatek, the problem isn’t that she tightens up down the stretch, it’s the opposite.

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“It’s not about the nerves, but if I’m leading on a match, sometimes I think that it’s like 4-1, my brain is kind of loosening up, I’m not as focused as I was before,” she said. “I'm trying to fight with that. The most important thing is to let go of that thought and just keep doing your work.”

“So I think, like, most of the people struggle with that. When they see their goal, they're there already. So yeah, I just remember what I'm doing with Daria. She explain to me a lot that kind of mechanism. I try to prevent that and just focusing on being here at the same moment because it’s tennis, everything can change in, like, five minutes.”

Once you see the finish line, how can you not start to imagine yourself crossing it? It’s a question, as Swiatek says, that every tennis player has to find an answer for. The fact that she already understands that this is a natural “mechanism” in everyone’s brain is a good start. In Paris and now in Adelaide, she showed an ability to continue concentrating on the ball in front of her—“doing my job,” as Swiatek likes to put it.

Swiatek did her job in Australia. Like the rest of the tennis world, she wondered how she would react to winning her first major title so suddenly and so early. She was likely disappointed by her Australian Open; while she fulfilled her seeding by reaching the fourth round, she was out-strategized by Simona Halep, and ended up losing a match she could have won. But she put it behind her right away in Adelaide, and played with the same upbeat hyper-focus that we saw in Paris. Like her favorite player, Rafael Nadal, Swiatek never seems to take an aimless step or a hesitant swing.

“Every second of my being on court has a purpose,” she says.

Swiatek’s first mission of 2021 has been accomplished. You get the feeling it won’t be the last.

Two weeks in Oz: How Australia allowed escape for players, fans

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 19:21:00 +0000

If you’re like me, you woke up automatically at 6:00 A.M. this morning, threw your legs out of bed, and started to walk toward your living room before you realized there was no more tennis to watch. Instead, sadly, it was back to the dull normal of local news. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to return to morning reports on traffic, weather, school closings, and the ups and downs of the vaccine rollout.

For the past fortnight, I haven’t had to pay as much attention to the unfortunate facts of pandemic life, because I could travel, through my TV set, to a land that has largely driven the virus it from its shores. Australia in 2021 has never felt more like its nickname, Oz. It’s a land where a Grand Slam can feel, and sound, properly grand.

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It wasn’t easy getting there. For two weeks, I'd gone to bed at midnight or 1:00 A.M. and been startled into consciousness by my alarm at 6:00 each morning. By 6:01 I had staggered out of my pitch-dark bedroom. By 6:02 I had the coffee-water boiling and had landed, still dazed and bleary-eyed, on the couch. Once there, I turned on the TV and tried to get a handle on what was happening in Melbourne Park.

This is not an ideal way to view or cover tennis. But for those of us who live on the East Coast of the United States, that early-morning wake-up call during the Australian Open can be a moment of special excitement and suspense. How many times have we turned on the TV and seen that a match we thought would be over hours ago is still going, into a fifth set? How many times have we tuned into the latter stages of a stunning upset, and realized something big was happening just beyond the buzz inside Rod Laver Arena? Getting up as the drama of a match is reaching its peak is not a bad way to start the day.

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This was doubly true in 2021, when nobody was sure the event could even be held. Craig Tiley, the Australian Open tournament director, enjoyed far less sleep than any of the rest of us—three hours on most nights, he said. But he says he would do it all again if he had the choice, and certainly tennis fans around the world would agree. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as grateful to have a Grand Slam to immerse myself in.

As always, more happened in those two weeks than we can easily recall.

I was shocked when I looked back at the draw this morning and rediscovered that the event began with a stellar duel between two Next Genners, Denis Shapovalov and Jannik Sinner. From there, we spent our late nights and early mornings watching Venus Williams bravely finish her first-round match after rolling her ankle. Nick Kyrgios set John Cain Arena on fire for three rounds. A fan flip Rafael Nadal the bird. Jessica Pegula knock out Victoria Azarenka and Elina Svitolina on her way to her way to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal. Fabio Fognini and his countryman Salvatore Caruso finish their five-setter with a war of words and hand gestures.

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We watched Su-Wei Hsieh inject some whimsical fun into the bubble with her shots and her laugh. Stefanos Tsitsipas exorcise a few demons with a five-set comeback win over Nadal. Garbiñe Muguruza reach the brink of victory against Naomi Osaka, and go no farther. Aslan Karatsev coolly and calmly, and with a rocket forehand, emerge from qualifying to make the semis. Ashleigh Barty lose her way, suddenly and thoroughly, at her home Slam again. Karolina Muchova and Jennifer Brady stage a heart-attack-inducing, multiple-match-point, multiple-break-point concluding game to their semifinal. Serena Williams put her hand over her own heart as she walked off of Rod Laver Arena for what could be the last time.

Finally, after all of those Cinderella stories, stories of frustration and perseverance, stories that make Grand Slams the most eventful and overstuffed of all regular sporting events, everything went back to normal at the end. The two players who many of us picked to win the singles titles, Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic, proved to be too good, far too good, for their final-round opponents. One is 22, the other is 33, but each looks set to have another big season.

For now, the rest of that season will have to wait. No one is exactly sure what 2021 will hold. All we can do now is thank Melbourne and the Australian Open for giving us hope for normalcy in the future. It was fun living in Oz while it lasted.

Nestled between January's summer swing of tournaments in Australia, and March's Sunshine Double in the U.S., February can be overlooked in tennis. But not in 2021, with the Australian Open's temporary move to the second and shortest month of the calendar. Beyond that, February is Black History Month, and also a pivotal time for the sport in its rebound from the pandemic.

To commemorate this convergence of events, we're spotlighting one important story per day, all month long, in The 2/21. Set your clock to it: it will drop each afternoon, at 2:21 Eastern Standard Time (U.S.).

Through pain and criticism, Djokovic holds off next generation at AO

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 15:24:00 +0000

Just when the gap between the men’s-tennis generations seems to be narrowing, it widens again. Just when the Big 3 seem to be slowing down and maybe, just maybe, giving into the inevitability of age, they leap ahead again and play as well, if not better, than they ever have before.

Sunday’s Australian Open final between Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev was the latest clash of the ATP generations, and the most-anticipated yet. Coming in, there were signs that this could be the watershed moment when a 20-something would finally topple a 30-something in a major final. Earlier in the tournament, Medvedev’s contemporary, Stefanos Tsitsipas, had worn down Rafael Nadal over five sets. Alexander Zverev had pushed Djokovic through four tight sets. Most promisingly, Medvedev had won his last 20 matches, and three of his last four against Djokovic. Djokovic himself called Medvedev “the player to beat.”

And then he beat him. Easily.

It took the world No. 1 a set and a half to set everything straight again, and put an end to any talk of a changing of the guard. By the close of his 7-5, 6-2, 6-2 rout, we had returned to our regularly scheduled programming—i.e., the Grand Slam title chase. With his 18th major, Djokovic has pulled to within two of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, while Dominic Thiem remains the only player under 30 who has won even one.

Djokovic won his ninth straight Australian Open final in the span of about 20 minutes at the end of the first set and the start of the second. He had jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first set, and then watched as Medvedev settled down and leveled the score. By the time they reached 5-5, they were each holding at love, and it looked as if we were in store for the long chess match of attrition that many, including me, had predicted.

Instead, Djokovic hit a good return and followed it with a forehand winner. He hit another good return, crosscourt from the ad court, that surprised Medvedev. He followed that with a perfectly threaded backhand pass. And he broke for the set when he stretched to return a tough serve, and Medvedev put a forehand into the net.

“The last game was love-40, [I’m] trying to come back,” Medvedev said. “Hit two good serves, one good point, 30-40. Make a really good serve. He managed to, on the stretch, like I do sometimes, bring it back. I put it in the net. Set is done. That's where he’s stronger than many other players on the tour.”

Medvedev seemed to answer right away by breaking Djokovic to start the second. In reality, he had no answer for Djokovic’s game today, for his serve, his return, his blend of offense and defense, his polish. Medvedev spent the first set where he likes to be, well behind the baseline. When that didn’t work, he tried to move forward and attack in the second set, with even more dire results. Serving at 1-2 in the second set, Medvedev went for two quick backhand winners, and ended with two quick errors, and a service break. That was essentially the end of the match.

“I felt like I wanted to mix up things,” Medvedev said. “I wanted to try to do something different, but I felt like he took all the time from me, he took all the advantage in his side straightaway.”

“I didn't play bad but I didn't play high best level. Probably he made his game that good today that I couldn't stay at my best level.”

Before the match, we had heard a lot about Medvedev, the master strategist. But, as the Russian said, it was Djokovic who kept Medvedev from playing his game today. He did it with his serve, which was there when he needed it. He did it, as always, with his return; Medvedev won just 32 percent of his second serve points and was broken seven times. He did it by mixing in drop shots and short backhands and forcing Medvedev to be ready to race forward at any time. He did it with his willingness and ability to attack; Djokovic was 16 of 18 at the net. He did it by making 17 unforced errors to Medvedev’s 30.

We say that the game evolves, but it hasn’t found a way to evolve past the Big 3 yet. They remain the most game’s most complete players.

“We’re talking about some cyborgs of tennis,” Medvedev said. “When they’re in the zone…I feel like they’re just better tennis players.”

Afterward, Djokovic emphasized the human side of his win, and confirmed that he tore an oblique muscle earlier in the tournament.

“It has been definitely emotionally the most challenging Grand Slams that I ever had,” he said, “with everything that was happening, injury, off-the-court stuff, quarantines. It has been, least to say, a roller-coaster ride in the last four weeks.”

“I just accepted the fact that I’m going to have to play with the pain.”

Yet if anything, Djokovic was the fresher player in the final, and he closed the tournament by winning nine straight sets.

“I don’t feel like I'm old or tired or anything like that,” he said. “But I know that, you know, biologically and realistically things are different than they were 10 years ago for me. I have to be smarter with my schedule and peak at the right time.”

Djokovic sounded especially satisfied that he’ll soon break Roger Federer’s all-time men’s record for weeks at No. 1, with 311. With that out of the way (and with Federer presumably not reaching the top spot again), Djokovic can narrow his goals and his playing commitments.

“It's going to be a relief for me because I'm going to focus all my attention on Slams mostly,” he said.

Djokovic also talked about the criticism he has received during the quarantine and during the event.

“Of course it hurts,” he said. “I’m a human being like yourself, like anybody else…I cannot say I don’t care about it.”

So he said he was “pleasantly surprised" when Medvedev, in his runner-up speech, told a story about how “super-nice” Djokovic had been to him when he was a young, unknown player.

Djokovic may always face criticism, and may never be as beloved by the tennis world at large as Federer and Nadal are. But if a player who knows him personally, and who just lost to him in a major final, can find a moment to praise him, maybe, someday, the rest of us can, too.

In knowing when to take pressure off herself, Naomi Osaka shines again

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 15:14:00 +0000

“I was extremely nervous. I honestly told myself before the match that I probably won’t play well,” Naomi Osaka said after her 6-4, 6-3 win over Jen Brady in the Australian Open final. “I shouldn't put that pressure on myself to play perfectly but just go out there and fight for every point.”

Whether Osaka “played well” in winning her fourth Grand Slam title depends on your definition of the phrase. Statistically, this wasn’t her best night. She made just 48 percent of her first serves, and had eight more errors than winners (24 to 16). But if you define it the way the history books will define it—by the result—Osaka rose to the occasion the way she always does at the business end of major tournaments. She won her 21st straight match, and ran her record to 12-0 in the quarters, semis, and finals at Grand Slams.

This is a player who obviously knows how to deal with pressure, and that means knowing when to take it off herself. Tennis is a sport filled with persnickety perfectionists, and Osaka has been one of them in the past. When she joined the tour—and even after she had become a major champion—it didn’t take much to send her spiraling downward in despair. But here she was in Melbourne, instinctively understanding that champions are the players who can win without being perfect.

And the way they win is by adjusting and compensating. If you’re making less than 50 percent of your first serves, you may need to be sharper with your returns, which Osaka was; she broke Brady four times in her nine service games. If your forehands and backhands aren’t landing in the corners with the same precision that they did earlier in the tournament, you may have to drive them up the middle of the court, which Osaka did effectively, and which forced Brady to rush through her long ground strokes.

“I wanted to return well,” Osaka said. “I think Wim [Fissette] told me the last time I played her I wasn't returning too well, and for me, that's something that I really have been trying to target during this tournament.

"I also think my serve wasn't too great today, but my returns really helped me a lot, which is something that I wouldn't be able to say, like, even last year.”

This gets us to what has turned Osaka from a dangerous opponent into an unbeatable one at the moment. At first glance, she plays the modern game to a T: she hits big serves and big ground strokes, and rarely bothers with the net—of her 69 winning points, she won just four in the forecourt on Saturday. In reality, her game is based on the same principle that made serve-and-volley the style of choice for decades: everything she does is designed to take time away from her opponent.

Osaka loves the flat T serve, which jumps on the opponent more quickly than any other shot. When she’s returning, she loves to step forward and crowd the server, who can see her leaning forward and spinning her racquet in anticipation. From the ground, Osaka mostly refuses to back off the baseline; her opponent knows that if she leaves any ball hanging in the middle of the court, she’s probably going to watch it go by her a couple of seconds later.

“She plays so aggressive that she puts so much pressure on you to perform well,” Brady said, “and that's something that not every tennis player, you know, has that ability to do that.

“She hit good shots when she needed them. In those moments, that's the toughest time to find those shots. You know, to put you on defense when it's the big moments. She obviously has confidence in her serve and serving out matches and playing high-risk tennis when it matters. So, yeah, it's tough to face.”

It’s also tough, when you face an aggressive player, not to become over-aggressive yourself, because you know you have to take every chance you get to put a good swing on the ball. You could see the effect of Osaka’s power on Brady in the final game. Down 0-15, needing a break to stay alive, Brady had a good look at a mid-court forehand. But she went for too much and sent it wide. On the next point, she had another good look, this time at a forehand return, but she went for too much again and hit it long. The statistics show that Brady made 31 unforced errors, but that should come with a caveat when Osaka is the opponent. She forces you, with her high-risk tennis, to answer with even riskier tennis of your own.

As the reigning US Open and Australian Open champion, Osaka has now won her second straight hard-court-Slam double. One thing that’s enjoyable about her career so far, from the fan perspective, has been the chance to follow her ever-evolving attitude and philosophy. She seemed to come into this major with a slightly different worldview than she had in New York. There she was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and she ended the event with what I thought was a stunning statement of confidence: “I’ve never played against someone who beat me when I was really trying hard.”

Osaka still hasn’t, of course, but in Australia she didn’t opt for such an ultra-assured mindset. To start, she put politics aside, at least for the moment.

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“For me, when everything happened in New York, I got really scared because I felt like it put me into this light that was a nonathletic light that I've never been in before,” she said. “I just came into this tournament just thinking purely about tennis.”

This time, when the tournament was over, she was quick to say that she’s not unbeatable.

“I think what I have learned on and off the court is it's okay to not be sure about yourself,” she said.

“I don't expect to win all my matches this year. That’s, honestly, somebody can give me a medal, anybody can give me a medal if I win all my matches this year, but I don't think it's possible. You know, tennis players, we go through ups and downs.”

Osaka says he’s not thinking about her future Grand Slam total. She’s not thinking about breaking any records. She’s not thinking about being No. 1. And she’s not, she told the Japanese press, playing with the same “anger,” the same desire “to put my stamp on the tour,” that she had when she won here in 2019.

“I like to take things non big picture,” Osaka said. “For me, I like to live in the moment…I don't want to weigh myself down with pressure and expectations.”

Judging by tonight’s result, the longer Osaka keeps the pressure off herself, the longer this winning moment is going to last for her.

Final Preview—Is Daniil Medvedev, not Novak Djokovic, the man to beat?

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 11:46:00 +0000

“He’s the man to beat.”

If you had to guess which of the two men’s finalists said this about the other, you’d probably say it was a show of respect from Daniil Medvedev to Novak Djokovic, right? Djokovic is the world No. 1, he’s the eight-time Australian Open champion, and he’s never lost a final in Rod Laver Arena.

But you would be wrong. It was Djokovic who paid that tribute, twice, to Medvedev in his post-semifinal press conference two days ago. And that was before he was sure he would face him in the final. Djokovic isn’t wrong: Medvedev is the man to beat, or to try and fail to beat, on the ATP tour right now. He’s won 20 straight matches dating back to last October. Perhaps more impressively, he’s won his last 12 against Top 10 opponents. Only the Big 3 have had longer winning streaks against elite competition.

“He ended out the season best possible fashion,” Djokovic said of Medvedev. “I mean, winning quite comfortable, actually, against top players, against myself in straight sets in London, and he just has improved a lot.”

As Djokovic mentioned, one of Medvedev’s 20 wins came against the Serb at the ATP Finals, a tournament that the Russian won for the biggest title of his career to date. In fact, Medvedev has won three of his last four meetings against Djokovic, the two most recent on Djokovic’s favorite surface, hard courts.

Medvedev is riding a 20-match win streak against top-shelf competition. (Getty Images)

How has he done it? Essentially, by out-Djokoviching Djokovic. When Djokovic is patient, Medvedev is more patient. When Djokovic attacks the net, Medvedev has his passing shots ready. If the match gets tight or he gets nervous, Medvedev has his serve to fall back on. From a speed and accuracy standpoint, Medvedev is one of the few guys who has ever been a match for Djokovic.

“He has a big serve,” Djokovic said. “For a tall guy, he moves extremely well. Forehand maybe was his weaker shot, but he has improved that as well. Backhand is as good as it gets. He’s so solid. He doesn’t give you much.”

Sounds a little like Djokovic himself, right?

“I like to play against Novak,” Medvedev said in his own post-semi presser. “We have, since the first one when I was ranked No. 60, we had always tough matches physically, mentally.”

“Playing final against him is superb. I’m really happy about it.”

Both men should be at full strength physically. Each won his semifinal in straight sets, and while Djokovic had an abdominal injury earlier in the tournament, he says he didn’t feel effects from it in his last match. But Grand Slam finals are about more than forehands and backhands, or legs and muscles. They’re also a delicate dance of confidence and nerves. Who will have the upper hand in that regard, the player going for his first major title, or the player going for his 18th, and trying hard to catch Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal at 20?

Since 2011, Djokovic is 63-3 at the Australian Open. (Getty)

“For sure when we get out there we both feel pressure,” Medvedev said. “I want to win my first one. He wants to win No. 18. We don't know for who the crowd is going to be. It’s all the small details. I think if we talk in general, well, I have nothing to lose, to be honest.”

Medvedev may have less to lose than Djokovic to start, but that will change quickly if he builds a lead. Just ask Dominic Thiem. Last year he was in Medvedev’s position. He came into the Aussie Open final against Djokovic with momentum, having beaten Nadal in the quarters. When Thiem went up two sets to one on Djokovic, his breakthrough seemed to be at hand. Until Djokovic won the last two sets, that is. Medvedev generally holds up well under pressure, and knows how to close, but he did have a hiccup in his semifinal with Stefanos Tsitsipas. Up two sets and a break, Medvedev let himself get agitated and gave the break back.

If this final were going to be played on any other court or in any other round I would probably pick Medvedev. To steal a phrase from a beer commercial, he’s the Most Interesting Tennis Player in the World at the moment. But this is what Djokovic does Down Under. He takes the guy who is a on a roll and stops his toll. In 2019, Nadal came into the final looking invincible, and left a straight-set loser. In 2020, it was Thiem who got the Djoker treatment. Twenty straight wins is an impressive run, but 8-0 in Australian Open finals is a lifetime’s work.

Winner: Djokovic

After US Open classic, who wins the Osaka v. Brady Australian rematch?

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:37:00 +0000

Naomi Osaka vs. Serena Williams would have made for a more high-profile Australian Open final, but anybody who remembers last year’s US Open semifinal between Osaka and Jen Brady shouldn’t be too disappointed that this is the championship match in Melbourne instead.

That semifinal in New York, ultimately won by Osaka in three back-and-forth sets, topped my list of the 10 best matches of 2020. It had full-blooded shot-making, stubborn comebacks from both players, and a poignant subtext: Osaka knew that if she lost, she wouldn’t have a chance to display her seventh and final mask, and wouldn’t get to remind the world of 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s life and death.

Coming into the Australian Open, I wondered if Osaka would be quite as determined to win without that extra motivation. It turns out she was, and she has grown even more confident in her ability to beat any opponent, and come back from any deficit. In the fourth round, she saved two match points and won the last four games against Garbiñe Muguruza, and in the semifinals she was clearly the better player against Serena.

As for Brady, I wondered if, after her breakout 2020, the 25-year-old was due for a fall back to earth and a regression to her normal level. Instead, she’s shown that her meteoric rise last summer was no fluke. As Brady says, the more she hits against the top players, the more she realizes that they can’t do anything with the ball that she can’t do.

Brady is two years older than Osaka, but they’ve been aware of each other since their junior days in Florida. Brady still remembers their first meeting as pros, at a lower-tier event in 2014: “I was, like, ‘Wow, she hits the ball huge. She's gonna be good.’ I mean, I was, like, ‘OK, she's got something special.’”

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She was right. While Brady won that first meeting, in Texas, Osaka has won both of their WTA-level matches. Who is more likely to win the third and biggest so far?

Osaka has won all three of her previous major finals. In fact, she’s 11-0 once she reaches the quarters at a Slam. From a pure shot-making standpoint, she has the advantage, over Brady and just about anyone else at the moment. If the ball is in the middle of the court and in her strike zone, especially on the forehand side, she’s going to belt it for a winner. And when she falls behind in her service games, she has confidence that she can serve her way out of trouble.

Brady can gain take that advantage away from Osaka if she can turn the rallies into running contests, and if she can work her way forward. Her first job will be to keep Osaka from dictating points with her return, and getting a chance to hit forehands in her strike zone from a stationary position. That’s a big ask right now, and while Brady managed it for one set in New York, she couldn’t keep it going for two.

I picked Osaka at the start of this tournament because she didn’t seem to believe she could lose. Nothing that has happened since has changed her mind. Winner: Osaka

What Framing Britney Spears tells us about the saga of Anna Kournikova

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 19:43:00 +0000

To commemorate this convergence of events, we're spotlighting one significant story per day, all month long, in The 2/21.

An hour or so into Framing Britney Spears, the new documentary about the pop singer, I had a flashback. It came during one of the many scenes from the mid-2000s where Spears, who was being hounded 24/7 by the tabloids at the time, is asked by a TV anchor whether she thinks she’s fit to be a mother and a role model.

The sight of Spears, leaning forward, face pinched in subdued forbearance, took me back to another encounter between the media and a less-than-pleased young female star from around the same time. The woman was Anna Kournikova, the site was the US Open interview room, and the year was 2002. Kournikova had just put on a disastrous performance in Louis Armstrong Stadium, losing 6-3, 6-0 to Angelique Widjaja, a player who would never crack the Top 50.

As always when Kournikova played, there was an overflow crowd and a ravenous atmosphere in the arena. The Russian was the most famous, the most endorsed, the most ogled, the most mocked, and the most searched-for female athlete in the world at the time, but she had missed the Open the previous year with a stress fracture in her foot, and had failed to get past the first round at the French Open and Wimbledon in 2002. A loss on this day would bring her season to a depressingly futile conclusion.

There were plenty of Kournikova fans in the crowd, but there was also an undercurrent of merciless scrutiny, of an audience waiting for the starlet to stumble off the stage. Kournikova obliged with a stream of double faults and bad decisions, in a match that got worse for her with each game.

“I made, like, a million mistakes,” Kournikova said afterward. “I don’t think it was a pretty match for anyone—especially for me.”

An admirably blunt assessment, but she wasn’t going to get off that easily. After every failure on the court, Kournikova had to answer for her financial success off of it. One questioner asked, “You’ve obviously read your press clippings over the years, ‘She gets great endorsements but doesn’t earn on the court.’ Does that add pressure?” Another pointed out that she had bounced a few of her serves in front of the net. Another wondered, “Do you feel you work hard enough?” Near the end, someone asked, “Do you worry about it from the business point of view, that the lack of tournament victories will cost the endorsements, maybe the photographers won’t show up anymore?”

“Oh good!” Kournikova snapped. “Good if they don’t show up anymore.”

Kournikova walks off the court, toward a throng of onlookers, after a one-sided loss to unheralded Angelique Widjaja at the 2002 US Open. (Getty Images)

Kournikova was just 21, but this would be her final match at the US Open. By then, you could almost believe that she really was sick of the photographers and the attention; of being The Woman Who Never Won a Tournament; of the wolf whistles that broke out every time she took off her warm-up jacket; of the lad-mag articles with headlines like “She’s Grand Slammin’”; of the boys in front rows who called out between points, “Pretty smile now, Anna”; of having a poker hand named after her because it “looked good but didn’t win much.”

Spears and Kournikova were both born in 1981, and both became famous as teenagers in the late 90s. Kournikova reached the Wimbledon semifinals in 1997, and Spears’ breakout song, “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” was released in 1998. They arrived at an especially media-saturated moment, when tabloid culture was reaching its peak in the U.S., and the Internet was making its presence felt for the first time.

Framing Britney Spears reminds us that this was also the era of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which brought a new level of frank prurience to the public sphere. As the Washington Post’s Ashley Fetters wrote last week, “The media—both the tabloids and more credible high-profile outlets—hounded women like Spears for disturbingly intimate details of their lives, then belittled and even villainized them for those very details.” Spears claimed to be a virgin, as did Kournikova. Or, as Newsweek put it in an article entitled “The Virgin Teen Queen" in 1999: “She wears the skimpiest clothes and sports the brawniest boyfriend in tennis, but Anna Kournikova, 18, insists she’s as pure as her tennis whites. ‘I do not let anyone even have a peep in my bed,’ the Russian vixen said.”

From the start, Kournikova was a subject for men’s magazines and the entertainment press rather than the sports pages. An Internet site began a countdown to her 18th birthday. People put her in its “50 Most Beautiful” list when she was 16. FHM named her the “Sexiest Woman in the World” a few years later. But the more she was hyped for her looks, the more she was bashed for being overhyped as a tennis player. ESPN included her in its list of the biggest flops of the last 25 years, and named her, at one point, the most overrated athlete in history.

“Her fame now seems oddly singular, the product of a time when every dude had a stack of Maxims in his bathroom,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in Grantland in 2012. “Kournikova was held up as proof that men could take a completely unremarkable yet thoroughly hot tennis player and use her as an excuse to never say one serious word about women’s sports.”

At the Virgin Megastore in New York City for an FHM magazine signing, 2000. (Getty Images)

A giant-sized cover of Maxim magazine at Sobe's "Tale Slide" Party in Hollywood, 2004. (Getty Images)

The lad magazine worldview spread during those years, and the WTA’s sex appeal was promoted. The Sony Ericsson Open in Miami ran an ad campaign featuring a shot of Kournikova above the tagline, “Come See Anna’s Serves and Curves.” At Tennis Magazine, we titled one of our WTA season previews, “The Bold and the Beautiful.” New York’s 2001 feature on the tour was called “Riot Girls.” (First line: “Jennifer Capriati is hot.”) In 2000, Sports Illustrated ran a cover shot of Kournikova lying on a pillow, and opened its feature on her with this subhead: “She won’t win the French Open, but who cares? Anna Kournikova is living proof that even in this age of supposed enlightenment, a hot body can count as much as a good backhand.”

Kournikova wasn’t just an innocent victim of her times. Looking back, she probably didn’t have to appear in a campaign for a line of bras with the slogan, “Only the Balls Should Bounce.” She probably could have turned down an appearance fee or two at a big event and won more matches—and even a title—at lower-tier tournaments. And she probably could have been easier to work with. In Venus Envy, his book on the WTA’s riot-girl days, Jon Wertheim describes a scene at a photo shoot in which a photographer reaches for a new lens and tells Kournikova, “Just hold on a second and we’ll make you beautiful.” To which she replies, “I already am beautiful. Just take the picture.”

In Eastbourne for a Berlei Shock Absorber Bra ad campaign, 2000. (Getty Images)

The rap on Kournikova was that she let her pursuit of fame and endorsement money distract her from her training. Looking at her outstanding junior résume—she won the Orange Bowl 18s as a 14-year-old, was the No. 1 junior in the world, and came with the Nick Bollettieri seal of approval—that seemed like a logical assumption. But Kournikova herself always adamantly denied it.

“I’m not involved in a lot of stuff like you guys say,” she said when she was asked about her “extracurriculars” at Wimbledon in 2002. “It’s 99 percent less of what everybody else says that I do.”

Were the criticisms legitimate? Her doubles partner and most famous frenemy, Martina Hingis, criticized her work ethic at one point. But at the same time, Kournikova was willing to hire Harold Solomon, a coach universally described as “no-nonsense,” to help her mount a comeback after her 2001 stress fracture.

The reasons for her demise were likely duller, and out of her control. There were the injuries to her back and spine, which forced her off the tour at 22. There was her size; she was 5’8” at a time when top women like Lindsay Davenport and Venus Williams were six feet or taller. There was her technique; Bollettieri said he regretted that his coaches were never able to develop a “killer forehand” for her.

Bollettieri and a young Kournikova, in Bradenton, Fla. (Getty Images)

There were her nerves; Kournikova was a shotmaker—Solomon called her an artist with a racquet—but she lacked the steeliness of her much more successful successor, Maria Sharapova. There was the feverish scrutiny that came with every match she played. And there was her age. At a time when Serena and Roger Federer are still in the thick of things at 39, it can be hard to believe that the saga of Anna Kournikova the tennis player was over so quickly. She never had a change to grow up, and presumably mature, in public, the way the pros do today.

Kournikova wasn’t the last woman tennis player to receive outsized attention for her looks. Even as Sharapova was winning the US Open in 2006, she was starring in a Nike ad with the theme song, “I Feel Pretty.” Ana Ivanovic drew similarly intense overflow crowds to her matches. In 2014, Eugenie Bouchard inspired a rowdy fan club at the Australian Open, and made the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the headline, “Genie Bouchard could be the future of women’s tennis. All she has to do is win.”

Sex and sexism haven’t been banished from the sport, and hottest-athlete lists aren’t going away anytime soon. But 2021 doesn’t feel like 2001, or even quite like 2014. These days Serena’s accomplishments and impact are compared with those of all-time sporting heroes like Muhammad Ali. Naomi Osaka shows up in fashion magazines, but her best-known clothing statements are the masks she wore at last year’s US Open to memorialize African-Americans killed by law enforcement. At 16, Coco Gauff has already proven to be an eloquent spokesperson on social issues. Instagram has given players a way to control their stories and images in ways their predecessors couldn’t. If Kournikova were playing and struggling today, there would be ogling and mockery. But she would likely have her defenders in the press and on social media, and hopefully she wouldn't be marketed or written about like it’s 1999.

There are worse fates than Kournikova’s. She made a lot of money because of tennis, she’s married and has three children, and she doesn’t seem to suffer from the same bizarre family circumstances as Spears. When I think about Kournikova’s career 20 years later, two polar-opposite moments come to mind, both from the US Open.

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During a night match in Ashe Stadium, a group of young males appeared in the upper reaches of the arena, wearing T-shirts that spelled out “K-O-U-R-N-I-K-O-V-A.” On changeovers, they bounced up and down and chanted her name. Kournikova wasn’t playing in the match, she wasn’t on the schedule that night, and, unless my memory is faulty, she wasn’t even in the tournament that year. But that didn’t stop them from chanting for her.

The second memory comes from the much smaller, now demolished, Grandstand court. Jay Caspian Kang described Kournikova as a “completely unremarkable player” in Grantland. That wasn’t true of her doubles game, which was creative and fun to watch. She won two Australian Opens and two tour championships with Hingis, was ranked No. 1 in doubles, and reached the finals of two Slams in mixed. Freed from the anxieties that come with putting yourself on the line in singles, Kournikova could show off the shots that so often failed her when she was on her own. Tennis is a lonely game for most players, but that seemed doubly true for the woman who was by herself at the center of so much attention.

On this afternoon in the Grandstand she wasn’t alone; she was playing a mixed-doubles match. The front rows were filled with the usual gawkers and leerers, who leaned as far into the court as possible. But the atmosphere was relaxed, and so was Kournikova, who traded smiles and high-fives with her partner (I think it was Max Mirnyi), and seemed happily oblivious to the scene around her. It showed in her play: She didn’t double fault, she held her own on returns and finished points at net, and she hit passing-shot winners. She and her partner, to the delight of the audience who cheered every good play she made, walked off winners.

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“Who is the future of U.S. tennis?” Jen Brady gives pundits an answer

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:32:00 +0000

“What’s wrong with U.S. tennis?”

Among pundits and the American public, it’s a question that never goes out of style. I thought it might be different at this year’s Australian Open, a tournament in which 17 U.S. players reached the second round, four U.S. women made the second week, and one will play in Saturday’s final, where she’ll try to become the second straight champion from the States. Yet none of that was enough to keep sports pundits on TV and in print from rehashing old complaints about the state of the American game.

When those pundits say “U.S. tennis,” it seems they really mean “U.S. men’s tennis.” And it’s true, only one American man, Mackenzie McDonald, made the fourth round in Melbourne. But it has been many years since this country has had such a diverse and growing cast of WTA contenders. If we’re looking for the next Serena Williams or Chris Evert, the next double-digit major-winning champion, we’re probably going to be disappointed. But I’d suggest a different way of defining success: Are players from the U.S. improving and getting closer to fulfilling their potential?

The evidence on the women’s side from Australia indicates that the answer is yes. Bernarda Pera upset Angelique Kerber. Ann Li made the third round at a Slam for the first time. Shelby Rogers made the fourth round at the Australian Open for the first time. Jessica Pegula made a major quarterfinal for the first time. And now Jen Brady is into her first Grand Slam final.

It took five match points, but Brady finally reached her first Grand Slam final. (Getty Images)

Brady’s semifinal against Karolina Muchova was rightfully overshadowed by the one that came before it, between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka. But Brady-Muchova turned out to be the more dramatic match. Its final game, in which Brady had five match points and Muchova three break points, may have been the most likely to induce a heart attack since Andy Murray tried to close out Novak Djokovic in the 2013 Wimbledon final.

Brady is about as American-sounding as they come. Asked what she was going to do before the final, she said, “I’m just going to hang with my team, have a little gym session.” The 25-year-old is also a consummate late-bloomer. She says it wasn’t her shots held her back when she was younger, it was her head.

“All the coaches that I had…they were always telling me I had potential to be a great player,” Brady said. “[But] I had a bit of a temper as a kid. Wasn’t really mentally the toughest. So I think that has kind of just shifted my whole career, just being able to stay in tough moments, close out tough matches, just fight my way back regardless of the score.”

The Pennsylvania native and Evert Academy product starred at UCLA, but she didn’t fully believe that she had an elite-level game until 2020. It wasn’t so much beating highly-ranked opponents that changed her mind; it was hitting with them, and realizing they couldn’t do anything with their shots that she couldn’t do herself.

“Because [at] the start of the year I had some good wins, I was practicing with the top players,” Brady said. “Once I was able to see, OK, they don't really hit the ball much bigger than I do, they don't do anything super spectacular compared to what I do, so I can do the same.”

Brady's forehand is one of the best in tennis, period. (Getty Images)

It’s one thing to believe you can play with the best on the practice court, but another to believe you can serve out a Grand Slam semifinal at 5-4 in the third set. It took Brady a few minutes to learn to do that, too. After beginning the final game with two bullet aces and going up 40-15, she confidently lifted her arms, as if victory was at hand. Little did Brady know how much work she still had to do, and the emotional roller coaster that was to come. She lost one match point and dropped to her knees in despair. She went down a break point and drilled a ball furiously into the net. She stared, bug-eyed, at her coaches. She seemed to be on the verge of a meltdown. According to Brady, she was.

“I was just so nervous,” she admitted. “I couldn't feel my legs. My arms were shaking. I was just hoping she would miss and she didn't, and she was playing more aggressive. Then I would say I started rambling, mumbling on and on and on and on. It was just point by point, point by point, and eventually I was able to close it out.”

It has been a long road to Brady’s first Grand Slam final. She went through hard quarantine and was unable to hit a ball for the first two weeks she was in Australia. Which is all the more reason for her achievement to be recognized back home.

“Who is the future of U.S. tennis?” the pundits have been asking for years. Jen Brady is giving them an answer.

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Australian Open preview: History favors Medvedev in Tsitsipas showdown

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:49:00 +0000

You might call this one the Juggernaut vs. the Giant Killer. After his straight-set win over Andrey Rublev in the quarterfinals, Daniil Medvedev looks like the former. And after his five-set comeback win over Rafael Nadal a few hours later, Stefanos Tsitsipas obviously qualifies as the latter.

These two have a history, and it mostly favors Medvedev. He won their first five meetings, including one in Miami in 2018 that ended in a war of raised voices and complicated accusations. For a while, Tsitsipas couldn’t find a way to solve the riddle that Medvedev poses with his mix of consistency and unpredictability.

Still, their contests were competitive; only one of their first five matches ended in straight sets, and that was a 7-6 (5), 7-5 win for Medvedev in Shanghai in 2019. Finally, a month later, Tsitsipas made his breakthrough by beating Medvedev in another tight two-setter at the ATP Finals in London.

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Coning into this semifinal, the 24-year-old Russian and the 22-year-old Greek should feel confident in their ability to hang in and compete. Medvedev won his first five-setter, against Filip Krajinovic, while Tsitsipas survived an early marathon of his own against Thanasi Kokkinakis, and then became just the third player to come back from two sets down to beat Nadal. Now they’ll play for a precious chance at a major final: It would be Medvedev’s second, and Tsitsipas’s first.

Tsitsipas said he reached nirvana against Nadal. Will he stay there, or will the effort leave him drained? Unfortunately for Tsitsipas, Medvedev is exactly the kind of guy who can drag you back to earth. Rublev looked like a world-beater in his first four matches in Melbourne, before Medvedev slowly ground him down.

To avoid that fate, Tsitsipas may have to launch an all-out preemptive attack. He’s much more skilled at the net, and plays with much more variety, than Rublev, so it’s not an impossible task. But it would likely require a second straight Herculean, red-line effort. Unlike Tsitsipas, Medvedev has been to this round and won before, and that experience may make the difference. Winner: Medvedev

Three to See, Serena vs. Osaka; Brady & Djokovic vie for Aussie finals

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 16:03:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the 2021 Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Naomi Osaka vs. Serena Williams

There are blockbusters, and then there’s Serena vs. Osaka. This is the meeting of the immoveable forces that we’ve been waiting to see in Melbourne. Only one of those forces can prevail, of course, so who is it more likely to be?

Osaka won her first two meetings with Serena—the second was the infamous 2018 US Open final—before Serena got a measure of revenge the next summer in Canada. All three of those were straight-setters, but judging by the stubborn way these two women have both been playing Down Under, this semifinal seems more likely to go the distance. In the fourth round, Serena edged Aryna Sabalenka 6-4 in the third set, while Osaka saved two match points and elevated her game down the stretch against Garbiñe Muguruza.

Serena has the motivation; if she wins this match, she’ll be heavily favored to win that 24th major she’s been after for four years. Osaka will counter with rock-solid confidence; no matter what happens in the early going in a match, she doesn’t seem to believe she can lose right now. That’s a good place to be as a tennis player. Winner: Osaka

Jennifer Brady vs. Karolina Muchova

This may seem like a battle of newcomers, but really it’s a battle of relatively late bloomers. Muchova is 24, and Brady is 25, but neither has much history in the later rounds at the majors. Brady will be playing in her second Grand Slam semifinal, and Muchova her first. But you wouldn’t know it from the way they handled her quarterfinals: Each lost the first set—Muchova to Ash Barty, Brady to Jessica Pegula—before running away with the third.

The Czech and the American are a classic contrast: Brady is a powerful, aggressive athlete who takes full cuts from both wings, while Muchova uses a mix of finesse and all-court dash. They’ve faced off once, on clay in 2019, and Muchova prevailed 7-6 in the third set. Their second match could also go either way, but Brady’s little bit of experience on this stage might be make the difference. Winner: Brady

Novak Djokovic vs. Aslan Karatsev

There’s no need to research the head-to-head between these two, because Djokovic has already admitted that he’d never even seen Karatsev play, let alone competed against him, before this year’s Australian Open. That’s because Karatsev has made one of the most improbable runs to a Grand Slam semifinal in recent memory. The Russian is 27, he’s ranked No. 114, and he began by winning three qualifying matches on another continent five weeks ago. Since then, he’s mowed down three Top 20 players—Diego Schwartzman, Felix Auger-Aliassime and Grigor Dimitrov—and wowed the tennis world with the potency of his forehand, and the cool, calm, collected way he’s handled his big-stage debut; Karatsev came back from two sets down to beat FAA.

Karatsev has a chance against Djokovic. With that forehand, he can do damage against anyone; he’ll have little to lose, at least at first; and the fact that Djokovic has never faced him should work to Karatsev’s advantage in the early going. But the element of surprise can only last so long. Winner: Djokovic

Was Tsitsipas' Nadal stunner a one-off, or a sign of things to come?

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 15:30:00 +0000

It started when he missed the shot he never misses.

Rafael Nadal had a two-set lead over Stefanos Tsitsipas, and a 1-0 lead in the third-set tiebreaker. Up to that moment, he had controlled play with his serve, made targeted strikes with his backhand return to break, and stayed a step ahead of his younger opponent from the baseline. Tsitsipas, who had a walkover in his previous round and hadn’t played in four days, came out flat and then started to press, and miss. When he batted an ugly backhand wide to lose the first point of the tiebreaker, it looked as if the Big 3 generation would survive yet another major-event challenge from their younger tour-mates.

Nadal began the next point confidently, moving Tsitsipas onto the defensive and forcing him to throw up a high lob that came down short—easy fodder on most days for Rafa, who has one of the game’s best overheads. But this time he caught it late and shanked it long. Maybe it was the height of the lob, maybe it was the lights around the stadium, or maybe it was the finish line that he glimpsed as he looked up, and which made him blink.

Whatever it was, Nadal had lost his mini-break. More important, with the semifinals in sight, he had lost control of the nerves. Two points later, he put an easy forehand into the net. Three points after that, he sent another overhead long, and he followed that with a backhand that flew straight into the air and out. Tsitsipas had been granted new life, and he would make the most of it.

Those misses changed the course of the match, and their memory stayed lodged in Nadal’s head.

“That tiebreak I made a couple of mistakes that I can’t make to win the match or the rest of the things,” he said. “He played well then later. Well done.”

A door had been opened for Tsitsipas, and, as he said, he “flew like a little bird” right through it. He said felt like he had entered tennis “nirvana.”

Tsitsipas flowed through his backhand like he never had before. He cracked forehands on the run, with pace and accuracy, like he never had before. He used his wide serve into the ad court as effectively as he ever had before. And he was physically stronger than Nadal down the stretch, like few other players ever have been before.

Rafa’s serve nearly got him to a final-set tiebreaker, but by the fifth set he was struggling to set up for his backhand or bend his knees for volleys. In the final game, with Tsitsipas serving for the match at 6-5 in the fifth, Nadal found a last burst of energy to reach break point, but Tsitsipas erased it with a service winner and, four hours and five minutes after the match began, hit a backhand screamer up the line to close out a 3-6, 2-6, 7-6 (4), 6-4, 7-5 win that may have been the biggest of his career.

Tsitsipas said that he had worked on being “more consistent with my mood,” and that “maybe the absence of the crowd” helped him stay calm. He also said that it wasn’t just Nadal’s misses that turned the tide.

“I think at the very third set I changed a few things,” he said. “I changed my patterns. I maybe took a little bit more time. I think that helped. I wanted to stay in the court a bit longer.”

“Then it just took off by itself,” he said. “I just played more flawless.”

This match was reminiscent of Nadal’s five-set win over Daniil Medvedev in the 2019 US Open final. In both cases, Rafa went up two sets to love on a talented younger opponent, before making a few anxious errors at the end of the third that gave the other guy a new lease on life. Nadal survived, just barely, against Medvedev in New York, and the Big 3 reigned supreme for another day. This time he wasn’t so lucky.

By the end, Tsitsipas-Nadal looked like what we traditionally think a battle of the generations should look like, with the 22-year-old gradually wearing down the 34-year-old. It’s a logical way for a four-hour match to end, but not one we’ve seen very often in the clashes between Big 3 and Next Gen. The question for the future is whether this was a one-off or a sign of things to come.

Rafa, naturally, seems to think it was a one-off caused by the back injury he suffered before the tournament began.

“I think my physical hold quite well,” Nadal said. “Is true that I probably need a little bit more time because is true that I was in great shape and for 20 days I was not able to practice the way that I expected, not able to play one single match in ATP Cup.”

On the one hand, this was probably the first time I’ve thought, “Well, I guess Nadal isn’t going to play forever.” On the other hand, no one should start to count Rafa out, even at 34, based on one result.

What matters right now is Tsitsipas’ performance. He has stumbled at the finish line on a few big occasions, and it looked as if he might stumble again at 6-5 in the fifth. Instead he got back up and won.

“I was very serene during the match, regardless if it was the first set or the fifth one,” Tsitsipas said. “I think honestly I wasn't expecting too much, and I wasn't expecting too less. It's a sign of maturity and sign of strength, I think.”

With a little help from Nadal, Tsitsipas found his tennis nirvana. Let’s see how long he can stay there.

Djokovic vs. Zverev had everything—but in the end, as usual, Novak won

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:09:00 +0000

We all know what Gary Lineker said about the sport that Americans call soccer.

“Football is a simple game,” the former English striker said. “Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.”

If we wanted to say something similar about men’s tennis over the last decade, it might go something like this:

“Tennis is a game in which there are blown leads and stirring comebacks, racquet smashes and primal screams, injuries and recoveries, brilliant returns and pinpoint passing shots, brutal rallies and great gets, tight tiebreakers and tense moments, and in the end, Novak Djokovic almost always wins.”

There was a little bit of all of that in Djokovic’s 6-7 (6), 6-2, 6-4, 7-6 (6) quarterfinal victory over Alexander Zverev at the Australian Open on Wednesday. Djokovic trailed 3-5 in the first set, before ultimately losing it in a tiebreaker. He trailed 1-4 in the third set, before winning it 6-4. And he trailed 0-3 in the third set, and had to save a set point, before closing out the match in a second tiebreaker after three hours and 30 minutes.

Yet despite the chaos and surface uncertainty, and despite the fact that Djokovic dug himself so many holes, I never felt as if the top seed was in serious danger. Even when he was behind in the score, Djokovic was still clearly the quicker, more consistent, more efficient, and deep down more confident player of the two. In the ongoing attempt by the Next Gen to close the gap with the Big 3 (or Big 2 in Melbourne), this match was evidence that much work remains to be done by the younger set.

“There was a lot of keys, a lot of turnarounds today,” Djokovic said. “It’s hard to pick one moment in the match where I feel like things have shifted, because it was really anybody’s game. It was really a roller-coaster of a match in every sense of the word.”

Of the 288 points that the Serb and German contested, I’ll isolate three that seemed to me to illustrate the difference between them.

The first came in the opening game of the second set. Djokovic had just lost a close tiebreaker after coming back from a break down. Many players wouldn’t be able to shrug off that disappointment right away, and might fall behind an early break in the second set. Djokovic did the opposite, and instead took a page from the mental playbook of his rival Rafael Nadal. When Nadal was young, his uncle Toni drilled into him the idea that a player who wins a set will relax for a game or two at the start of the next set, and that this is the time to strike back with a service break. Djokovic struck back against Zverev right away, firing a brilliant forehand return on the first point, following it with a forehand winner, and eventually breaking serve. In an instant, the German’s momentum was halted. Djokovic’s return and forehand on that point alone made me feel as if he would be able to raise his game above Zverev’s whenever necessary.

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The second crucial point came with Zverev serving at 4-2, 30-30 in the third set. He hit a good wide serve that Djokovic blocked back. The ball landed short and bounced high, and looked like easy pickings for a Zverev forehand. But he hesitated a split second, and then hit an average down-the-line approach. Djokovic anticipated it and responded with a backhand pass that Zverev couldn’t handle. The point illustrated both Djokovic’s superior counterpunching skills, and Zverev’s lack of self-assurance with his transition game. If Zverev wins that point, he would have had a game point for 5-2. Instead, Djokovic broke for 3-4 and came back to win the set.

The third and final point I want to mention happened with Djokovic serving at 5-6 in the fourth set. This might have been the best and most taxing point of the night. Djokovic fired his forehand, Zverev fired his forehand harder, and the two went corner to corner. Finally, Zverev demolished a forehand down the line that looked certain to go for a winner…until Djokovic appeared in the screen, slid toward the ball, and reflexed a one-handed backhand for a winner of his own. Besides being the rally of the match, it was also indicative of the fact that, as well as Zverev might play, and as hard he might push Djokovic, the world No. 1 still has the answer.

“It was just a tough match,” said Djokovic, who hit 23 aces and 48 winners. “I mean, I feel really exhausted. It was a great battle. We took each other, pushed each other to the limit.”

“Until the last serve, it was anybody’s game.”

And then, just like so many times before, Djokovic won.

Three to See, Day 10: Nadal-Tsitsipas, Brady-Pegula, Medvedev-Rublev

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 05:02:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the 2021 Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Daniil Medvedev vs. Andrey Rublev

Medvedev and Rublev are friends, fellow Muscovites, and teammates on Russia’s Davis Cup and ATP Cup squads. But they’ve yet to become rivals as pros. Medvedev is 3-0 against Rublev, and hasn’t dropped a set in any of their three meetings. The most recent came in the quarterfinals at the US Open last fall, where Medvedev managed to think his way past a hot-hitting Rublev in two tiebreakers that could have gone either way. Rublev is just as hot now as he was then; can Medvedev defuse him yet again?

Medvedev has dropped a couple of sets in Melbourne, but he also bounced back from adversity and won in a fifth over Filip Krajinovic. At some point, Rublev will blast his way past Medvedev’s long-limbed defenses, but I’m going to say it won’t be this time. Winner: Medvedev

Rafael Nadal vs. Stefanos Tsitsipas

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Nadal is 6-1 against Tsitispas, and the last time they faced off Down Under, in the 2019 semifinals, Rafa won 6-2, 6-4, 6-0. But hidden within that unsurprisingly one-sided history are a couple of interesting nuggets. Tsitsipas’s lone win over Nadal came on clay, which should tell us there was nothing flukey about it. And the last two times they played, Tsitsipas took a set before losing in three.

All of which means we’ve reached that moment we seem to reach so often in the men’s game these days: Can a Next Genner make a breakthrough against one of the Big 3 in a Grand Slam? And again, I’m going to guess the answer is no. Tsitsipas may be ready, but Nadal has played his way into the tournament and looks prepared to peak at the right time. Winner: Nadal

Jen Brady vs. Jessica Pegula

The U.S. may never produce the next Serena, but it is building a brigade of second-week Slammers. A year ago, neither Brady nor Pegula would have seemed to be likely candidates to contend for a major title, but here they are in the quarters against each other, playing some of the best, most offensive-minded tennis of anyone in the tournament. Brady hasn’t dropped a set, and Pegula recorded her first win over a Top 10 player when she beat Elina Svitolina in the fourth round. After one of her wins, Pegula left a good-luck message for Brady on a TV camera. Should she have been careful what she wished for?

Maybe: Brady can take the racquet out of most players’ hands when she’s on her game. But Pegula’s forehands are coming off her strings like rockets right now, and she won her only previous meeting with Brady. Winner: Pegula

Major Takeaway: Hsieh destroys usual preconceptions of pro players

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 12:54:00 +0000

“She plays like someone you would see down at your local courts,” is a common reaction to the sight of Hsieh Su-Wei on TV.

It’s true that the Taiwan native doesn’t look or act like most professional tennis players. She’s a 5’7’’ and 126 pounds, and she doesn’t try to intimidate anyone with a confident strut or multiple fist pumps and screams per game. Once the point starts, she’s even more unorthodox. She hit with two hands on both sides, there’s not much knee bend or upward thrust in her serve, and she hardly bothers to take those little adjustment steps we’re always reminded to take. After a match is over, Hsieh doesn’t sound like most pros, either. When she was asked about her upcoming quarterfinal with Naomi Osaka, she said, “She probably going to smash me on the court.”

At the same time, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anyone play tennis like Hsieh in my neighborhood. I’ve never seen anyone take an 80-m.p.h. ground stroke from their opponent and casually deflect it into the corner for a winner, or redirect it at an impossibly sharp angle crosscourt, or come under it at the last second with a perfectly disguised drop shot, or invent a new angle from the middle of the court. I definitely don’t see anyone closing out points with volleys as compact and unerring as hers.

Maybe, as my friend and colleague Joel Drucker suggested on Twitter this week, recreational players should try to be a little more like Hsieh. Maybe we shouldn’t automatically tell kids to drop their second hands on their forehands when they reach a certain age. Or teach everyone to base their games on the killer Western-grip forehand. Or discourage using different spins and speeds from one shot to the next.

That said, not everyone—or anyone?—has Hsieh’s hands and hand-eye coordination; there’s a purity to the way the ball comes off her racquet. She makes everything in tennis outside of the contact between the ball and string seem superfluous. Strength, speed, footwork, mechanics: What does any of it matter when you can time the ball the way she does?

That’s not to say that her success has been easy. In Melbourne, Hsieh has become, at 35, the oldest player in the Open Era to reach a Grand Slam quarterfinal for the first time. It obviously took longer than normal for her to fulfill her potential and get the most of her natural skills. She learned the game first from her father, far from the world’s most famous academies.

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“We always move from south to north, back to south, to move everywhere to try to play tennis,” she said on Saturday. “It was not very easy because there’s no national tennis center in Taiwan. There’s not many people have experience. There’s limited information that we get.”

The fact that Hsieh’s game developed in relative obscurity allowed her, it seems, to play the way she wanted. But it also left her without much of a support system when she joined the tour as a teenager.

“Sometime I go to the tournament, I have no one to warm up,” she said. “I’m more worry about how you going to survive today for the match, I hope I don’t play really bad on the court because I couldn’t warm up.”

Former pro Paul McNamee was a fan of her game, and couldn’t believe she was ranked outside the Top 300. He stepped in to lend a more professional hand.

“Before I work with him, I have a lot of time alone, so I don’t have information [from] other people. So I have no idea where is my game. That’s why is not so easy to improve or find out.”

McNamee helped bring structure, and much more success, to Hsieh’s career. But he’s careful not to crush her free and creative spirit. McNamee told WTA Insider this week that when Hsieh isn’t “feeling it,” her practice session might last two or three shots, and that she has gone upwards of three years without restringing her racquet. Before this year’s Australian Open, she had her first restring since the start of last season.

This is what makes Hsieh’s success so satisfying, and watching her do her thing so thrilling. For decades, we’ve see the pros rigidly change their racquets after every ninth game. We’ve heard them talk about how hard they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We’ve seen them become more intense with their fist-pumps and screams on court, and more careful and scripted in the interview room. There’s something freeing about watching Hsieh blow up all of our preconceptions about what a tennis player needs to do to succeed, and how they’re supposed to act and play. It’s a lesson that extends to our lives outside the court—you can, to put it simply, be yourself.

Even if Osaka does 'smash her on the court' in the quarterfinals, Hsieh has brought some much-needed magic to the start of the tennis season.

"I think I just stay the same,” she said of her approach to Tuesday’s match. “Enjoy, try to be positive. If I don’t win, I hope quarantine finish very soon [so] I can go out to enjoy a little bit.”

Hsieh is far from a recreational player, but she has plenty to teach all of us.

Three to See, Day 9: Serena v Halep, Osaka v Hsieh, Djokovic v Zverev

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 07:56:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the 2021 Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Naomi Osaka vs. Hsieh Su-wei

When an on-court interviewer reminded Osaka who she would be playing in the quarterfinals, she made a face. No wonder: She and Hsieh have played four times at the WTA level, and three of those matches have gone the distance.

While Osaka is 3-1 in them, she nearly lost the third-rounder they played here in 2019. It isn’t just that those matches were close, though; it’s the nature of her opponent’s game that worries Osaka. Of all the tricky, deceptive, and frustrating players to play, Hsieh may be the trickiest, the most deceptive, and the most frustrating. She’s 35, she’s slight, she walks softly between points, and she barely seems to move her feet or use any energy during them. Then you look up and the ball is flying past you, in a direction you never thought it could go.

Osaka will likely need some time to figure out how to seize control of the rallies and keep Hsieh from weaving her web. But based on her recent, perfect results, she will. Winner: Osaka

UPDATE: Osaka wins, 6-2, 6-2

Serena Williams vs. Simona Halep

What matters more, the overall head-to-head record between two players, or the result of their most recent meeting? If it’s the former, then Serena is the clear favorite here: She’s 9-2 against Halep. If it’s the latter, you have to like Halep’s chances; the last time they played, in the Wimbledon final in 2019, she won 6-2, 6-2 in 55 minutes.

How about their current form? That’s a toss-up. In the fourth round, Serena and Halep both adjusted their games and found their way through difficult opponents, 6-4 in the third set. The fact that each of these veteran champions suffered through a bad patch of play and survived should give them confidence that they can do the same again, which means we could be looking at a three-setter. That’s what happened the last time they faced each other in Melbourne, and Serena won. Winner: Williams

UPDATE: Williams wins, 6-3, 6-3

Novak Djokovic vs. Alexander Zverev

When Djokovic faced, and edged, Zverev at the ATP Cup two weeks ago, I wondered if it might be a preview of bigger occasions to come. Zverev seemed to be in form to start the season, and we all knew Djokovic would be hanging around in the second week at the Australian Open.

After an injury scare two rounds ago against Taylor Fritz, Djokovic has arrived in the quarters seemingly intact. We may not know for the rest of this event exactly what he’s feeling, but that shouldn’t change Zverev’s mindset. He’ll have to play the match of his life to win. He has beaten Djokovic twice in seven tries, but doing it in best-of-five, in Rod Laver Arena, is the second-toughest task in the men’s game today. Winner: Djokovic

Major Takeaway: Halep adjusts on the fly to soar past powerful Swiatek

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:23:00 +0000

“So yeah, it’s tennis,” Iga Swiatek said with a smile after her 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 defeat at the hands of Simona Halep on Sunday.

Tennis, as this match reminded us, doesn’t always work out the way you expect. You might think that the faster a court gets, the more it benefits the attacker. And if that’s true, it would be Swiatek, a tall and aggressive player, who would be helped more than Halep, who relies on her road-running defense. When they met on slow clay at Roland Garros last year, Swiatek didn’t give Halep any time to dig in and defend. Surely, she could do the same thing on a speedier hard court, right?

But that’s not what happened. Instead, it was Halep who used the pace of the surface to her advantage, by keeping the ball deep and hitting a heavier ball, so that it bounced up quickly on Swiatek. Rather than rushing Halep, Swiatek was the one who was rushed. To create her power, she uses long swings, especially on the forehand side. On this court, she didn’t have as much time to wind up for those shots as she did at Roland Garros, or as much time to set up and dictate the rallies. Which led to the odd sight of an attacking player looking like she was the one pressed for time, while the defensive player was in her comfort zone.

According to Halep, who started slowly, it was a two-step adjustment process.

“I thought before the match that I have to be a little bit more aggressive than in Paris,” she said. “In Paris, I have been very far back, and my ball didn’t go through the court.”

“But then I saw that I do some mistakes…I don’t like to do easy mistakes. And then I just step back a little bit. I did a step back, and I wanted just to open the court more to have more time and to roll the ball better.”

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What wasn’t surprising about this match was how the more experienced player was able to adjust on the fly, in a way that the younger player couldn’t. Swiatek came out determined to disrupt Halep’s rhythm. She rushed the net, she used the drop shot, she kept the ball out of Halep’s strike zone with her kick serve. And it worked beautifully, for a set. But when Halep took that step back and started hitting with more depth, Swiatek didn’t respond with an adjustment of her own. She kept trying to push forward and end the points quickly, even when the opportunity wasn’t there, and Halep kept making her pay for it.

“I think, you know, she just played, like, really smart, and I have a lot of respect because it seems like she has a lot of options,” Swiatek said. “When something is not right for her, she just changes the tactics, and that’s great. But I think that’s the difference between the champions and less-experienced players, because I didn’t feel like I had many options.”

Swiatek never found a plan B the way Halep did. She kept swinging big, kept rushing forward, kept making errors—42 of them, to 17 for Halep. If there was a crucial point, and one that summed up the match, it came with Halep serving at 4-3, 30-30. This was Swiatek’s chance to earn a break point, but in her haste to make it happen, she came in a shot too soon and was forced to hit a low backhand volley. She left the ball short, and Halep was there for the forehand pass. The moment of tension had passed, and Halep cruised from there.

“Maybe I was playing too strong and risking too much,” Swiatek said, “but it was because she was just reaching every ball, and I had to finish five times in one rally.”

If there is a stat to remember from this match, it might be this one: Halep is 29, Swiatek is 19. Sometimes experience matters. As Swiatek said, “So that’s tennis”: It will surprise you in one way, but it will confirm your expectations in another. In this case, the result makes sense: Halep will move on to play Serena Williams, and Swiatek will tip her visor and say thanks for the lesson.

Three to See, Day 8: Tsitsipas-Berrettini, Nadal-Fognini, Barty-Rogers

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 11:04:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the 2021 Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Ash Barty vs. Shelby Rogers

In the last round, I picked Ekaterina Alexandrova to upset Barty because I thought the Russian’s baseline grind might wear on the Australian, the same way Sofia Kenin’s steadiness did here last year. But Barty beat Alexandrova routinely. I’m tempted to pick against her again, though, because Rogers knows how to spring an upset at a major, and at her best, she has the power to push Barty around at the baseline and make volleying a difficult proposition. But Barty won their only meeting, and all other things being normal, she’s the better player. Winner: Barty

Rafael Nadal vs. Fabio Fognini

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We all remember what happened the last time these two met at a major: A flame-throwing Fognini came back from two sets down to beat Nadal in a post-midnight classic at the US Open. What we might remember as well is that Rafa went on to win seven of their next eight matches, that’s he’s 12-4 against Fognini overall, and that, perhaps most important, he’s 6-1 against him on hard courts.

That doesn’t mean Fognini can’t repeat his New York miracle. He was sharp in his straight-set win over Alex de Minaur on Saturday, and the faster Melbourne Park courts may help him against Rafa; Fognini is the one who will need to make the ball move through the court as quickly as possible. But Rafa really won’t want to lose to him again. Winner: Nadal

Stefanos Tsitsipas vs. Matteo Berrettini

The only previous main-draw match between these two Top 10 players came in the first round at the Australian Open two years ago. Tsitsipas edged out a close four-set win, and went on to have a breakthrough run to the semifinals. Since then, the Italian, who made his own breakthrough run to the US Open semifinals later that year, has slowly caught up to the Greek. Both players have been sharp in 2020; Tsitsipas is 5-0 and Berrettini 4-1. But in his last round, Berrettini walked off complaining of a possible abdominal pull. Tsitsipas is already a slight favorite; a Berrettini injury would make him a heavy one. Winner: Tsitsipas

Major Takeaway: Vekic's gritty win reveals wide-open draw Down Under

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 12:44:00 +0000

When players save match points, they usually show relief or happiness. Donna Vekic reacted a little differently when she staved off defeat against Kaia Kanepi in their third-round match on Saturday. Down match point in the second set, the 24-year-old Croatian rifled one forehand down the line, and then swatted away the floating reply with another, disdainful forehand crosscourt. It sounded like, when the ball went for a winner, Vekic said, “Ugh!”

“I was actually pretty pissed that I was down a match point because the game before I had a couple of break points on her serve, and I thought I was playing better,” Vekic said. “I thought the momentum was switching a little bit towards my side, so I was like, ‘OK, how am I match point down? I don’t want it to be over.”

Vekic may have thought she had the momentum, but watching from the outside, Kanepi appeared to be marching to a sure victory. When the Estonian is fit and on her game, the way she had been in Australia so far this year, you can start to wonder how anyone beats her. She’s a powerful athlete who hits a big ball, and in the previous round she had dismissed the defending champion, Sofia Kenin, as if she were a junior. Looking at Kanepi’s draw after that match—she was in the less-star-studded top half—I started to have visions of her winning the Australian Open and giving a speech at her induction into the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport 10 years from now.

But there’s a reason why Kanepi doesn’t dominate the tour the way you think she might, and she reminded us of it against Vekic. For every blistering winner she cranked out, there was a routine miss, and as the match went on, the misses began to outweigh the makes. Hitting hard by itself will only take you so far at this level, because players will get used to your pace and find ways to throw it back at you. That’s what Vekic did as she slowly got her teeth into the rallies.

“It was definitely a difficult match from beginning to end,” Vekic said. “I had to fight for every point.”

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In this case, Vekic’s words didn’t sound clichéd; they sounded like the plain truth. She extricated herself from this match. Every game was a battle, and she didn’t look destined to win, at least to me, until the final point was played. Between rallies, she walked slowly and seemed to mull over all of her possible moves. But as they say in boxing, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

“I definitely had a plan in place today,” Vekic said. “But she was hitting it so big and so hard, sometimes it was tough. I tried to open up the court to play some angles, but when you have bombs coming at you, it's difficult, so I tried to do what I can and just run.”

Vekic is ranked 33rd, and has been as high as 19th. But she has never quite fulfilled the sky-high potential everyone believed she had when she left the juniors for the pros at 16. Points don’t come easily or automatically for her against the faster and more powerful athletes she often faces. But she is working now with Sam Sumyk, who has helped Victoria Azarenka and Garbiñe Muguruza to Grand Slam titles. Vekic may never join that pantheon, but she’s into the fourth round at the Australian Open for the first time. And she’s doing it on courts that aren’t necessarily suited to her game.

“I've never played the second week in Australia, so I think this is my worst Slam when it comes to results,” Vekic said. “I’m surprised I did it this year with the courts being so fast and all that. I don't like this trend of Grand Slams making their courts faster and faster, but maybe I'm going to start liking it from now on, I don't know.”

Vekic may not love the courts, but she has to like being in the top half of the draw. Serena, Osaka, Halep, Muguruza, Swiatek, Vondrousova, and Sabalenka are all in the bottom half, while the top half features just one major-title winner, Ash Barty, who, despite being No. 1, is not an invulnerable opponent. (There are 32 major titles represented in the bottom half, and just one on the top half.) That doesn’t mean anything is going to be easy in the second week, of course. In her next match, Vekic will play Jen Brady, a player who has rolled through her first three matches, and who is the dark-horse pick of many to come out of this half and reach the final.

“You know what,” Vekic said when she was asked about facing Brady, “everyone is playing great tennis. At this point there is—I keep saying it in the last couple of months, years, there is no easy matches on the WTA Tour. There’s no easy opponents. Everyone is playing really good tennis, so I think every match you have to be ready for a battle.”

Three to See, AO Day 7—Osaka v Muguruza kicks off women's blockbusters

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 05:18:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the 2021 Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Naomi Osaka vs. Garbiñe Muguruza

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***Coverage begins at 6 p.m. ET on Tennis Channel.***

Like Serena Williams and Aryna Sabalenka, these two Grand Slam champions will try their baseline weapons on each other for the first time on Sunday. Luckily for us, if not for each other, they both appear to be in peak early-season form—neither has come close to losing a set so far this week. But Osaka’s competition has been a little stiffer, and in general she has come up a little bigger in high-stakes moments like these over the last few years. Both women like pace, but I’m guessing that it will be Osaka who likes Muguruza’s more than the other way around.

Winner: Osaka

Serena Williams vs. Aryna Sabalenka

Tennis fans have been waiting for this one: Finally, two of the game’s hardest hitters, and most expressive performers, will go toe-to-toe. Both like to dictate, both can rifle winners at will on their good days, and either one could come out on top, depending on who happens to have a good or bad day. Serena is a slight favorite because, well, she’s Serena, and this is the fourth round of a major. But Sabalenka may be in slightly better form at the moment. She is coming off three recent title runs, and for the most part she has played with an ideal mix of aggression and discipline in her first three matches at the Australian Open. But she hasn’t played Serena.

Winner: Williams

Simona Halep vs. Iga Swiatek

Unlike the players in the other two marquee women’s fourth-rounders, Halep and Swiatek know each other’s games well. Or as well as you can when you’ve spent about two hours on court together, anyway. They’ve played twice, but neither match has lasted very long. In 2019, Halep beat Swiatek 6-1, 6-0 at Roland Garros; last year Swiatek returned the favor at the same event, in only slightly less decisive fashion, 6-1, 6-2. Halep still has much more experience, especially in the later rounds at the majors, but hard courts should favor Swiatek, who is the bigger hitter and more aggressive player. The 19-year-old determined to make herself into a consistent winner. Here’s her chance to start.

Winner: Swiatek