by If you don’t like tennis, please skip this post!
Manic Monday certainly lived up to its name on the women’s side. Ashleigh Barty’s loss was a major surprise, because she’d been in supreme form. For some reason – there doesn’t have to be one, these things just happen – she struggled with her ball toss in the last two sets, and Alison Riske was more than competent and confident enough on grass to capitalise on those weaker serves. All four of Riske’s matches have gone to three sets, some of them deep into the third, and today she faces Serena Williams. When I suggested to my parents this morning that Serena might now take the title, there was a collective groan. Oh god no.
I saw the final set of Barbora Strycova’s win over Elise Mertens. Strycova had been down a set and 5-2, but won the next eight games on the way to a 4-6 7-5 6-2 victory. Strycova is such a fun player to watch, and after completing the Bertens-Mertens double, she plays Johanna Konta in today’s quarter-final where she’ll be an underdog.
Five of yesterday’s eight women’s matches went to three sets. Another of them was a marathon between two Czechs, and two Karolinas, Pliskova and Muchova. Pliskova was one of the favourites for the tournament. When my student arrived, Muchova had just broken back to level the final set at 11-all. Pliskova was broken again at 11-12, thanks to a net-cord on match point, and the emergency tie-break (which I didn’t see coming in a women’s match) was once again narrowly avoided. This was a thriller and it was a shame I couldn’t have seen more of it.
The only match I saw in its entirety yesterday was Simona Halep’s win over Cori Gauff. I thought this would be a tricky match-up for Gauff, due to Halep’s counterpunching style and court craft, and so it proved. Simona now faces Zhang Shuai, who she’s had a tough time against before, notably in Melbourne. Zhang goes through these purple patches that can make her almost unstoppable. This is far from a foregone conclusion.
Another women’s match I saw snippets of was Elina Svitolina’s win against Petra Martic. Svitolina won 6-4 6-2, but it was a real battle, with so many interminable deuce games in both sets. Exactly 100 points were played in the opening set.
The men’s matches didn’t grab me so much. Kei Nishikori’s four-set win over Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Kukushkin was kind of fun, but Guido Pella’s triumph in five sets against Milos Raonic was the stand-out match. Raonic led by two sets and served for the match in the fourth. Pella returned brilliantly in the fourth and fifth sets, and Raonic seemed out of ideas beyond “keep acing, and maybe something will happen on the return game”. At 4-5 and 40-15 on Raonic’s serve, Pella came up with an extraordinary winner from so far out of position that he ran into the rolled-up cover on the side of the court. Oh man, how cool was that? Pella reached match point in that game, and had two more in the 5-6 game. Raonic kept serving – acing – his way out of trouble (OK, on one of the match points he also hit a rather nice volley). Eventually, at 6-7, Raonic cracked. Pella was a joy to watch and I was glad he won.
Finally I dropped in on a men’s doubles match, featuring the British player Joe Salisbury, which was suspended for bad light at 5-5 in the fifth. Emergency tie-break today?
Update: Yes! Kontinen and Peers beat Ram and Salisbury 13-12 in the fifth set, on a decisive 7-2 final tie-break. A lot has to happen to get that far, and it nearly didn’t (that’s why I call it an emergency tie-break). The eventual winners had two match points at 8-7 but couldn’t take them, then dropped their serve in the very next game, only to break Joe Salisbury in game 18. The commentators didn’t appear to be fans of the 12-12 shoot-out; one of them expressed a strong preference for 6-6, but I disagree just as strongly.
