The nugget of wisdom bequeathed to Carlos Alcaraz by his grandfather, and tattooed in shorthand on his left wrist, has never felt more pertinent than it did on Sunday at Roland Garros, where the 22-year-old Spaniard saved three championship points against Jannik Sinner, the Italian world No 1, to win the longest French Open final in history.

Having divided the past six majors equally between them, the pair have already inherited the mantle of the Big Three. But their epic first meeting in a grand slam final brought vibrant confirmation that tennis has a life beyond Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, with Alcaraz recovering from two sets to love down for the first time in his career to prevail in a fifth-set tiebreak after five hours and 29 minutes of pure theatre. 

In staving off three match points, Alcaraz achieved a feat not seen in the men’s game since 1927, when Henri Cochet came within a point of defeat on six occasions before finally prevailing against fellow “French musketeer” Jean Borotra in five sets. 

That statistic alone is indicative of the historic nature of what was undoubtedly the greatest comeback in a grand slam final since the open era began in 1968. Djokovic saved two match points to deny Federer a 21st major at Wimbledon in 2019, but the most obvious point of comparison came in 2004, when Gastón Gaudio prevailed in an all-Argentine Roland Garros final, likewise saving a pair of championship points after dropping the first two sets against Guillermo Coria. 

That, though, was a nervous, cramp-ridden affair; this was tennis of an entirely different order. In the first French Open final to be decided by a final-set tiebreak, Alcaraz initially found Sinner every bit as impenetrable as the Italian’s previous 20 grand slam opponents. Yet the Spaniard somehow summoned the will and the level to force a decider in which Sinner displayed extraordinary reserves of physical and mental fortitude, defying cramp and then defying Alcaraz, who served for the title at 5-4, to take the contest down to the wire. 

Only at the death was Alcaraz finally able to pull clear, the defending champion riding the momentum from a jaw-dropping backhand pass in his final service game to produce a near-flawless exhibition of shot-making in the climactic tiebreak. A brilliant running forehand sealed a victory for the ages, 4-6, 6-7 (4-7), 6-4, 7-6 (7-3), 7-6 (10-2), and sent rapturous observers scurrying for superlatives, with some even comparing the match to the 1980 and 2008 Wimbledon finals between, respectively, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe and Nadal-Federer.

“If people put our match in that table, it’s a huge honour for me,” said Alcaraz after sealing his fifth grand slam title. “I don’t know if it is at the same level as those matches because those matches are, you know, the history of tennis and the history of the sport. So I let people talk about it, if for them [the matches] are almost the same. 

“But for me, watching from outside or realising what that match is in the history of tennis, I don’t know if our match is in the same table as them. But [I’m] just happy to put our match and our names in the history of the grand slams, in the history of Roland Garros. I [leave] the discussion to the people.”

So what of that discussion? The drama of the denouement was undeniable, and both men produced some majestic tennis. For two sets, Sinner was almost unplayable; by the end, it was Alcaraz who was untouchable. Yet it should also be acknowledged that, until the latter stages, they rarely played their best tennis at the same time. As Sinner marched into a seemingly unassailable lead, suffocating Alcaraz with the quality of his serving and deep, central returns, which denied the Spaniard the angles on which he thrives, the heightened sense of anticipation surrounding the contest dwindled. 

Put it this way: had Sinner gone on to seal the title in four sets, the match would never have been mentioned in the same breath as Borg-McEnroe 1980 or Federer-Nadal 2008, both of which featured genre-defining fourth-set tiebreaks in which match points were saved and individual points forever seared in the memory. The equivalent shootout here was relatively devoid of jeopardy, two of Sinner’s three points coming early, and from unforced errors. 

Instead, the pivotal moments came when Sinner made three straight errors with Alcaraz serving at 3-5, 0-40. Duly emboldened, the Spaniard slammed down an ace, smoked a forehand down the line, and cupped a hand to his ear, drinking in the acclaim of a crowd desperate to see more. Alcaraz duly obliged, breaking with some scintillating all-court play, and from that moment on the fascination became whether he could finish what he had started, staging a repeat of his comeback from a similarly parlous position against Sinner at the 2022 US Open.

So while the score might have evoked memories of those classic Wimbledon finals, the context was as different as the surface and the protagonists; a new match, for a new generation. And perhaps that is as it should be: not every chapter in the sport’s evolution has to echo the previous one, as Sinner pointed out.

“I think every rivalry is different, no?” Sinner said of the contest’s place in the pantheon. “Back in the days, they played a little bit different tennis. Now, you know, the ball is going fast. It’s very physical. It’s slightly different from my point of view, you cannot compare.”

Everyone will have their own opinion, of course, and many of the sport’s luminaries were in no doubt about what they were seeing. 

“They’re playing at a pace that’s not human,” enthused TV pundit and three-time French Open champion Mats Wilander. “Insane level,” Stan Wawrinka declared on social media. McEnroe even suggested both men would have been favourites against peak Nadal – proof, if nothing else, that the American analyst’s aptitude for going too far burns as bright as it did in his playing days. But Alcaraz probably had it about right when he remarked that, good as the match was, he’d seen better.

“To say it was one of the greatest finals in the history of the grand slams, it’s really high status,” he told TNT Sports. “I have to say that there have been better finals. I’m going to say one: Novak [Djokovic] against Rafa [Nadal], the final of the Australian Open [in 2012]. That level of final is pretty high. In history, there have been better finals I guess. But I’m just really happy to put my name into one of the best finals, the longest finals, here in Roland Garros.”  

Few could have guessed what was coming in the early stages. While Sinner was clinical, Alcaraz seemed to be all out of the stardust he normally sprinkles on these occasions. Even when he won the third set it felt more like a gesture of defiance, a minor skirmish won, than the start of a more wholesale turnaround. 

While Alcaraz’s spirit was admirable, it was still difficult to imagine Sinner letting the match slip. The Italian’s serve dipped markedly in that middle set – he won just 44% of points behind his first delivery, compared with 70% for the match as a whole – and the likelihood remained that he would find a solution.

True, the flashes of brilliance from Alcaraz’s racket were becoming more frequent. But the defending champion was still overpressing, trying to force the play rather than construct points with an endgame in mind. A case in point came at the start of the third, when a searing crosscourt forehand fell narrowly wide, costing him a break. Alcaraz gestured frustratedly to his box, evidently mystified by the imprecision of his baseline bombs. 

By the latter stages of the decider, however, the Spaniard was beginning to hit his targets with ominous frequency. There was a setback when he failed to serve out the match at 5-4, but that was mainly because Sinner threw the kitchen sink at him.

The Italian had never previously won a match spanning more than three hours and 50 minutes. Yet, despite showing signs of cramp early in the set, he came within two points of doing so with Alcaraz serving at 5-6, 15-30. It was an incredible effort, given this was just his second tournament after a three-month drug ban, but Alcaraz remained immovable.

Only Borg and Nadal have won five grand slam titles at a younger age, a timeline all the more remarkable for the fact that he reached that milestone at 22 years, one month and three days – exactly the same age Nadal was when he achieved the same feat. 

“I have to realise that I’ve done it, I think that’s the first step,” Alcaraz said of that unlikely conjunction. “The coincidence of winning my fifth grand slam at the same age as Rafa Nadal, I’m going to say that’s destiny, I guess. 

“It is a stat that I’m going to keep for me forever, winning the fifth grand slam at the same time as Rafa, my idol, my inspiration. It’s a huge honour, honestly. You know, hopefully it’s not going to stop like this.”

After the greatest comeback in living memory, that seems unlikely. Alcaraz showed the mental strength to keep fighting when all looked lost, the spirit to work his way back into contention, and the courage to play his best tennis when the need was greatest. Head, heart, cojones: just like his grandfather always told him.

The post Alcaraz pulls off epic comeback to beat Sinner in French Open final appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

On an afternoon when a trophy the Belarusian world No 1 coveted slipped through her fingers, it felt like a metaphor.

Two hours earlier, Coco Gauff had been little more than a bystander at her own execution. A devastating early onslaught from Sabalenka had propelled her to a 4-1, 40-0 first-set lead, and she looked poised to take a significant stride towards a career grand slam by adding a maiden Roland Garros title to her US and Australian Open victories. 

Instead, in an echo of her win over Sabalenka at Flushing Meadows in 2023, Gauff rose from the canvas to mount an improbable comeback, hustling, chasing and counterpunching her way to a 6-7 (5-7), 6-2, 6-4 triumph and a second grand slam title. At 21, she becomes only the second American woman this century to triumph in Paris, following in the footsteps of Serena Williams, who was a year younger when she won the first of her three titles in 2002.

It was not a day for the aesthetes – the conditions saw to that – and Gauff later acknowledged the utilitarian nature of her performance. But winning ugly is still winning and, for a player once coached by Brad Gilbert, who famously authored a book on that very subject, the end more than justified the means. 

While Sabalenka fretted and fussed about the wind and her own inconsistency, Gauff simply played her tennis when she could, and scrapped, scurried and made balls whenever her opponent’s sporadic periods of excellence did not allow her that luxury. It was enough. 

“I’m just really happy with the fight that I managed,” said Gauff. “Today wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done and that’s all that matters.”

Just how deeply it mattered became clear after two hours and 38 minutes, when a final Sabalenka backhand flew wide, signalling the conclusion of a scrappy, emotionally fraught contest that swung back and forth as violently as the windblown flags above Court Philippe Chatrier. Gauff fell to the court on her back, her body convulsed with emotion, her mouth agape, before rising to embrace Sabalenka. 

Making her way to the opposite end, she then sank to her knees on the clay, making a heart gesture as she looked up at her parents, Candi and Corey, before joining them in the stands. Perhaps the most touching moment came when her father, his eyes welling, tenderly wiped the clay from her clothes and face in preparation for the trophy ceremony.

There were tears too back on court, where Sabalenka cut a distraught figure as she sat in her chair trying to make sense of it all. For a fortnight, she had looked every inch the world’s best player. She cruised into the semi-finals without dropping a set, dispatching the Olympic champion Qinwen Zheng along the way, and then did what no one else has been able to do since 2021 by defeating Iga Swiatek, a four-time champion on the Parisian clay. But after her early dominance, she slowly began to implode. 

If the 70 unforced errors with which Sabalenka finished the afternoon were alarming, even more so was the manner in which she unravelled mentally in the face of an obdurate opponent and a troublesome breeze that, as Gauff later explained, was hard to hit through from one end but mae the ball fly from the other. When Sabalenka won her first major title at the Australian Open in 2023, it seemed she had finally tamed her combustible nature. But she has now lost three of the six major finals she has contested, and here she reverted to old habits, her features all too often torn with anguish as she bellowed at her team and railed against the elements. 

To her credit, she gathered herself sufficiently to make a fight of the decider, recovering from a break down to square proceedings at 3-3 and continuing to give everything even when another error-strewn service game put Gauff back in the driving seat. It made for a tense finale, but it was too little, too late. 

Sabalenka ripped an audacious forehand return winner to save a first championship point, but was taken by surprise as Gauff attempted to convert a second, the wind holding up the American’s looped forehand as it looked to be sailing long. As the ball nosedived sharply on to the baseline, Sabalenka could only prod back a weak reply; her fate was sealed. If her frustration was understandable, particularly given that Gauff had been helped on her way by a mishit forehand earlier in the same game, her reluctance to give proper credit to her opponent was less so.

“Honestly, guys, this one hurts so much, especially after such a tough two weeks, playing great tennis, and in these terrible conditions, showing such terrible tennis in the final, that really hurts,” Sabalenka said after fighting back tears.

It was an honest admission of how she felt in the moment, but also a notable departure from the usual practice of congratulating the champion and her team first. Sabalenka went on to congratulate Gauff as the better player on the day, but later doubled down on her initial analysis, placing the blame for her defeat on the wind and her own poor play. She also emphasised the American’s good fortune. 

“Conditions were terrible and she simply was better in these conditions than me,” said Sabalenka. “I think it was the worst final ever played.

“Honestly, sometimes it felt like she was hitting the ball from the frame and somehow, magically, the ball lands in the court and you’re kind of on the back foot. It felt like a joke, like someone from above was just staying there laughing and, you know, ‘Like, let’s see if you can handle this’ – and I couldn’t today.

“I think she won the match not because she played incredible, just because I made all of those mistakes.”

If it seemed a slightly churlish assessment, the 27-year-old’s portrayal of herself as her own worst enemy was accurate. It was Flushing Meadows 2023 all over again, with Sabalenka frequently on top in the baseline exchanges only to be undone by Gauff’s defensive resilience and her own inconsistency. 

The ultimate outcome was barely imaginable after the first five games. Sabalenka set the tone with an emphatic opening service game that included a second serve ace, a pair of teasing drop shots and the same irresistible combination of depth and power off the ground that had toppled Swiatek. 

But as the initial onslaught subsided and her errors became more frequent, the variety vanished from Sabalenka’s game. It flickered back to life briefly at the business end of the first set, the Belarusian reeling off four straight points from 3-5 down in the tiebreak with a blend of power and finesse. But by that point, Gauff had started to believe. Win or lose, she was ready to fight.

“After I lost the first set, I told myself, like, I’ll just give it my all and, you know, if I lose this match then at least I can say I gave it all out there, and I’ll go home and I’ll see my boyfriend,” said Gauff. “I’ve been telling myself that every day. 

“Obviously I’d love to be here and I’d love to win, but sometimes you realise, you know, if you lose, whatever – well, not whatever, I hate losing – but you know what I mean, you go home and you reset. 

“So today when I lost that first set I tried not to put too much pressure on the match and I think it worked – I was able to loosen up after that and play a little bit freer.”

As a double grand slam champion, Gauff can look to the future with a little more freedom too. From the moment she defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon as a 15-year-old, she has lived with the pressure of suffocating expectation; six years on, she can rest secure in the knowledge that, even at this early stage in her career, that youthful promise has been fulfilled.

The post Gauff thwarts Sabalenka to win French Open title appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

But Iga Swiatek was dethroned in humbling fashion at Roland Garros on Thursday, Aryna Sabalenka ending the Polish defending champion’s remarkable 26-match winning run on the Parisian clay with a 7-6 (7-1), 4-6, 6-0 victory as she advanced to the French Open final for the first time. 

Throughout her reign of terror in the French capital, Swiatek has often swept through sets without dropping a single game in a set – the dreaded “bagel”, as it is known in tennis parlance.

Jokes about “Iga’s Bakery” have been plentiful, but for once it was the 24-year-old who had too much on her plate, Sabalenka producing near-perfect tennis to dominate the decider so thoroughly that she dropped just six points and, remarkably, made no unforced errors.

“Six-love, what can I say?” said Sabalenka. “It couldn’t be more perfect than that.” 

Indeed not. It was a brutal exhibition of power tennis from the Belarusian world No 1, who began the afternoon in commanding vein, blasting her way into an early 4-1 lead, and ended it equally emphatically after being drawn into a more protracted battle. Through to a third straight grand slam final, a feat last achieved by Serena Williams in 2016, Sabalenka will face second seed Coco Gauff on Saturday with a fourth major title – and first away from the hard courts she favours – firmly in her sights.

“It’s going to mean everything to me and my team, because I have to say that almost my whole life, I’ve been told the clay court is not my thing, and then I didn’t have any confidence,” said Sabalenka. 

“In the past, I don’t know how many years, we’ve been able to develop my game so much, so I feel really comfortable on this surface and actually enjoy playing on clay.”

It didn’t always look like Sabalenka was having fun, particularly when she was unable to convert points for a 5-1 lead. Determined to take the contest by the scruff of the neck, she achieved that ambition early on with a combination of irresistible serving and deep, bludgeoned returns that landed at Swiatek’s feet almost before she had completed her service motion. On a drizzly day in Paris, the closed roof on Court Philippe Chatrier seemed to play into the 27-year-old’s hands, allowing her free rein to take on her shots unencumbered by the swirling wind outside.

But as Swiatek chiselled her way back into contention, moving inside the baseline, showing greater aggression on the return, and belatedly landing her first serve with greater frequency, Sabalenka made plain her frustration, muttering to herself furiously and casting dark looks towards her team. Swiatek levelled at 4-4 before a late exchange of breaks brought up a tiebreak. The Belarusian bossed the shootout, but now she knew she was in a match.

Though down a set, Swiatek could draw encouragement from the knowledge that she had navigated a similar challenge two rounds earlier against Elena Rybakina, who also set a daunting early pace and used her power to rush the defending champion into error.

It is widely acknowledged that Swiatek is never more vulnerable than when she is denied time, and in that respect Sabalenka, whose success is measured in the milliseconds it takes for her blunderbuss strokes to work their destructive magic, represents the ultimate challenge. But there is a reason Swiatek went into the contest with just two losses from 42 previous appearances at Roland Garros, and in the second set she showed her mettle.

Returning with greater depth and penetration, Swiatek secured an early break with a pair of rifled backhand winners, only to relinquish the advantage immediately with a poor service game.

But when Sabalenka replied in kind, producing an error-strewn game to concede a second break, Swiatek was not about to repeat her mistake. She instead consolidated the advantage with panache, producing a first ace of the afternoon, an exquisite piece of touch on the half-volley, and an extraordinary, lunging drop shot. In the minutes that followed, Swiatek produced her finest tennis of the fortnight and, arguably, her entire, chequered season. 

Without a title since defeating Jasmine Paolini in last year’s final, the four-time champion has slipped from first to fifth in the rankings, and will fall to seventh next week. In recent months, she has suffered losses to Jelena Ostapenko, Mirra Andreeva, Coco Gauff and Danielle Collins, respectively ending title defences in Qatar, Indian Wells, Madrid and Rome.

But as she became bolder in the baseline exchanges, producing some sharp touches at the net and improving markedly on serve – where she won 71% of points behind her first delivery, up from 43% in the first set, and more than doubled her success rate behind the second – there were glimpses of the Swiatek of old. It made Sabalenka’s superiority down the stretch all the more sobering.

“She still served really well, I feel like I served the same and she read my serve much better, so I probably won less points on the return,” said Swiatek. “I think I lost my intensity a bit and she just played pretty strong, as in the first set, but I didn’t react to that well and just couldn’t push back.

“The pace from her was super fast, she for sure, especially at the beginning of the match, played as hard as possible and pretty risky, so it was just hard to get into any rally. [In the second set] I was able to do that, so more things happened, it wasn’t just like serve and one shot, or return and one shot, I could build the rally.  

“In the third set I feel like we came back to what happened in the first, and she for sure used her chances and I didnt really keep up what I was doing in the second set.”

There were no such difficulties for Gauff, who ended the extraordinary run of French wildcard Loïs Boisson, the world No 361. The Frenchwoman, who carried the hopes of a nation after defeating three seeded players en route to the semi-finals including Jessica Pegula, the world No 3, and the sixth-ranked Mirra Andreeva, but struggled to reproduce that form as she slumped to a 6-1, 6-2 defeat. Gauff will now attempt to claim the title that eluded her three years ago, when she was routed by Swiatek in the final. 

“My first final here, I was super nervous, and I kind of wrote myself off before the match even happened,” said Gauff, 21, who defeated Sabalenka to win the 2023 US Open. “Obviously, here, I have a lot more confidence just from playing a grand slam final before and doing well in one.”

Whether that will be enough to stop Sabalenka is another matter.

“It was a big match, and it felt like a final, but I know that the job is not done yet,” said Sabalenka. “I have to go out there on Saturday, and I have to fight and I have to bring my best tennis, and I have to work for that title. 

“I’m ready; I’m ready to go out, and I’m ready to fight. And I’m ready to do everything it’s going to take to get the win.”

The post Sabalenka dethrones Swiatek at French Open to set up Gauff final appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

The French world No 361, the breakout star of this Roland Garros, continued her astonishing run with a second top-10 win in three days, defeating the sixth seed Mirra Andreeva, 7-6 (8-6), 6-3, to become the first wildcard in the open era to reach a women’s singles semi-final on the Parisian clay.

On a stage that has seen so many French players freeze down the years, Boisson was once again a revelation, backing up Monday’s epic three-set victory over Jessica Pegula, the world No 3, with another performance full of wit, style and tenacity. 

The 22-year-old’s game is a joyous patchwork of skidding slice and rearing topspin, one moment all artful drop shots and angles, the next a battery of booming serves and big forehands. 

It is a formidable arsenal, one that combines the modern power game with the artistry of a bygone era, and its potency has been magnified by the impassioned support of a crowd yearning to acclaim a homegrown champion for the first time since Mary Pierce conquered Paris a quarter of a century ago. A French Open that began in emotional fashion, with Rafael Nadal, Caroline Garcia and Richard Gasquet all bidding the tournament farewell, may yet conclude in similarly impassioned mood.

If that is to happen, Boisson will first have to get past Coco Gauff, the American second seed, who came from behind to defeat her compatriot Madison Keys 6-7 (6-8), 6-4, 6-1 in the day’s first quarter-final. But for a player making her grand slam debut just months after returning from a torn anterior cruciate ligament that denied her a wildcard appearance at her home slam last year, everything seems possible now.

“It’s really incredible, I’m so happy to be in the semi-final here, and I hope it will continue,” said Boisson, who is projected to rise to 65 in the rankings and is now a prime candidate to receive a wildcard for Wimbledon, for which she is currently 60th on the list of alternates. 

“I don’t really think about what will be next, you know, the ranking, Wimbledon and everything. I just try to stay focused on this tournament now. I really enjoy everything that I live here, on the court and outside the court, so I will see this after. For now, I just have to prepare the match of tomorrow.”

As Andreeva can attest, the same applies in reverse. For all the experience the 18-year-old Russian has accumulated across the course of her brief career, she is unlikely to have encountered a skillset like that possessed by Boisson too often. Unsurprisingly, Andreeva’s coach, the former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martínez, was an interested observer during the Frenchwoman’s dramatic win over Pegula.

It seemed initially that the Spaniard’s scouting would reap dividends for her young charge. Andreeva went about her business with intelligence and purpose, biding her time from the back of the court and refusing to become entangled in Boisson’s intricately woven web of ever-shifting spins and tempo. 

The Russian struck her backhand down the line with devastating potency and was constantly alive to the danger posed by Boisson’s touch, moving forward swiftly to intercept her opponent’s drop shots and dealing with them calmly and clear-headedly once there. 

It was a performance of precocious maturity from the teenager, and it carried her all the way to a set point at 5-3. Boisson fended off the danger with a deliciously angled backhand winner and drew on her defensive skills to save another set point at 5-6 down in the tiebreak, but it was her topspin-heavy forehand that did the bulk of the damage, pushing Andreeva deep into her backhand corner and opening up the court for her to move in and kill off points at the net. 

The Russian was not helped by the Parisian crowd, who were to be found belting out the French national anthem as early as the warm-up, and who cheered every Boisson success as throatily as they hailed Andreeva’s errors. It was a lot for the teenager to cope with but, for all her obvious exasperation, she heeded Martínez’s vocal demands to step inside the baseline and take on anything short, rapidly opening up a 3-0 lead in the second set.

Her inner turmoil remained close to the surface, however, never more obviously than when she slapped her thigh in frustration after failing to return a Boisson drop shot, and slowly her game began to unravel amid a welter of unforced errors. 

On match point, as a final despairing lob from Andreeva drifted wide, Boisson sank to the clay on her back, briefly overcome by emotion as she became the first French player to reach the last four since Marion Bartoli in 2011. She arose covered in red dirt and covered in glory, but her emotional reaction should not be mistaken for satisfaction. As she remarked afterwards, no young player dreams of making a semi-final; more remains to be done.

“I don’t think it’s a miracle,” said ­Boisson. “For sure, I have a little bit of luck also, but I think it’s just the hard work that I put [in] since I started ­playing tennis, and also last year with my rehab and everything, it’s just the result of hard work. Nothing else. 

“I think every kid who plays tennis has the dream to win a slam. More for French players to win Roland Garros. It’s a dream. For sure I will go for the dream, because my dream is to win it, not to be in the semi-final. So I will try to do my best for it.”

Paris expects nothing less.

The post Boïsson beats Andreeva to continue dream French Open run appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

“No,” she replied without missing a beat.

She was kidding no one. All present knew Swiatek would rather face former Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, whom she had beaten four times in eight attempts, than cross swords once with her Latvian nemesis Jelena Ostapenko, the victor on all six occasions they have met. The Polish defending champion managed to keep a straight face for all of two seconds before dissolving into laughter. 

“Am I a good liar?” she enquired with a grin. “Let’s say it doesn’t matter, really. Oh my God, I couldn’t play poker.”

No doubt Swiatek’s mood brightened further when Rybakina went on to dismiss Ostapenko in straight sets. Once in the Latvian’s shoes herself, however, it was not long before her mood dropped. Less than three-quarters of an hour, in fact – the time it took for the big-hitting Rybakina to blaze her way into a seemingly unassailable 6-1, 2-0 lead. By that stage, Swiatek was showing signs of the kind of agitation that has surfaced with unwelcome frequency in this season of struggles. It did not bode well.

This time last year, the 24-year-old was queen of all she surveyed, ranked No 1 and so dominant on her beloved red clay that she racked up 19th straight victories on the surface, winning titles in Madrid and Rome before claiming her fourth Roland Garros crown in five years. Now, a set and a break down against an opponent in irresistible form, Swiatek looked on course to suffer the heaviest defeat by a defending champion since Serena Williams salvaged just four games against Garbiñe Muguruza in 2014. An ignominious exit beckoned, but Swiatek was not done.

“I was feeling pretty bad, so I kind of accepted that I could lose the match,” she said. “But it didn’t change the fact that I wanted to fight for it.”

Fight she did, somehow summoning the will and tenacity to turn both the tide and, quite possibly, her entire season, as she recovered to claim an extraordinary 1-6, 6-3, 7-5 victory. It was her 25th in succession at Porte d’Auteuil, a milestone only Chris Evert, Monica Seles, Bjorn Borg and Rafael Nadal have reached since the dawn of the open era in 1968. Tough days lie ahead, but there is a growing sense of momentum around the world No 5.

“I think I needed that kind of win to feel these feelings that I’m able to win under pressure, and even if it’s not going the right way, still turn the match around to win it,” said Swiatek. 

“For sure, it’s a great confirmation for me. I for sure wanted to have a match like that. Obviously it’s great to also have full control over the match, but against great players it’s not always going to be possible. I’m happy that I fought, and I also problem-solved on court.”.

The most pressing problem, having fallen behind at the start of the second set, was how to arrest the relentless tide of winners flowing from Rybakina’s racket and gain a foothold in the contest. Swiatek’s solution was to raise her physical intensity, chasing down every lost cause and forever forcing her opponent to play one more ball. She retreated further behind the baseline to return the 12th-seeded Kazakhstani’s penetrating serve and found greater shape on her forehand. She used her venomous topspin to break the lines and push Rybakina back off the baseline, and ramped up her footwork and aggression. 

Swiatek also rode her luck, first when Rybakina netted an inviting forehand volley at break point down in the fourth game, then when she survived a service game in which she produced three double faults. Suddenly, Rybakina was no longer playing at the same exalted level, errors creeping into her game as her focus wavered for the first time.

“There was a moment in the second set, when I had the volley on top of the net and I lost, it was a big turnaround,” said Rybakina. “She stepped in, she started to play more aggressive and I was down already.

“Also, physically, I started with very good intensity, I was aggressive. In the second set it was quickly she went up, so it was tough to come back. Generally, I think I wasn’t pushing well with the legs on the serve, so it was a bit tough.”

The decider was nonetheless a tight affair, and Swiatek did well not to let her focus waver after the ninth game, when both players thought the Pole had secured a break that would have left her serving for the match. The chair umpire, Kader Nouni, had other ideas, correctly ruling that Rybakina had not double-faulted as called, and the 25-year-old made the most of the reprieve, holding for 5-4. 

Swiatek, though, was not to be denied. Serving to stay in the match, she held to love, then capitalised on a string of unforced errors from Rybakina to move within touching distance of the last eight. After sealing victory with a vicious cross-court forehand winner, she clenched her fists and roared with delight. 

Swiatek now faces a quarter-final showdown with Elina Svitolina, who saved three match points in a 4-6, 7-6 (8-6), 6-1 win over last year’s runner-up Jasmine Paolini. Two summers ago, the Ukrainian defeated her at the same stage of Wimbledon. But as this match demonstrated, Swiatek is a different creature on the red dirt; having defied the odds here, she could just be tougher than ever to stop.

The post Swiatek climbs off the canvas to beat Rybakina at French Open appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

Yet the 38-year-old Serbian arrived at Roland Garros, where a fourth title would finally pull him clear of Margaret Court as the most successful player in history, as something of an enigma. 

On the one hand, until a few days ago Djokovic had not won a tour-level event since the 2023 ATP Finals. In recent months, he has exited tournaments in Qatar, Indian Wells, Monte Carlo and Madrid without winning a match. His ranking has slipped to sixth, while his coaching partnership with former rival Andy Murray, which the pair originally planned to continue through the French Open, recently came to an abrupt conclusion. 

But just as the impression of a great champion on the wane was hardening, Djokovic’s victory at last weekend’s Geneva Open changed the parameters. With four restorative wins behind him – not to mention the 100th title of his career – Djokovic could look forward to his Paris opener against Mackenzie McDonald with his confidence replenished. 

His participation in Rafael Nadal’s retirement ceremony on Sunday, when he appeared alongside Roger Federer and Murray, will doubtless have offered a further ego boost, a timely reminder of his place in the sport’s history, while a return to Court Philippe Chatrier, the scene of his extraordinary Olympic triumph over Carlos Alcaraz last summer, will only have intensified the feelgood factor.

The question was, which Djokovic would we see? The guy who has spent much of the year struggling to string two wins together, or the one who said all along that the French Open was the be-all-and-end-all of his clay-court campaign? For once, there was something strangely unknowable about this most familiar of champions. 

Perhaps the prevailing sense of uncertainty weighed on the 98th-ranked McDonald. The gifted 30-year-old memorably defeated an injury-stricken Nadal at the 2023 Australian Open, but never looked remotely capable of staging a similar performance here, particularly once Djokovic successfully lobbied officials to get the roof closed after just five games. 

It took a few minutes of remonstration from Djokovic – and a few more for the giant retractable canopy to snap into place – but, the moment it did, McDonald’s challenge was effectively extinguished. While the conditions remained slow and the balls heavy, once Djokovic no longer had to contend with the wind, his movement, variety of shot and technical excellence became unanswerable. 

“He makes it seem like a video game, almost, for him,” said McDonald. “He’s able to do so much. I don’t even think he was playing his best tennis or his highest level. But if I pushed him to a different point, he would bring it.”

All of which, no doubt, would have been music to the former champion’s ears at the business end of a torrid spring. But was the roof closure a case of star power carrying the day, given that play continued without interruption on the outside courts? Not a bit of it, insisted Djokovic following his 6-3, 6-3, 6-3 win. 

“I was just asking if and when they were going to make a decision to close the roof and how long we were going to play under that rain,” said the Serb. “It was quite pouring rain out there on the court, because it was affecting the court as well, the court became quite damp and [there were] a lot of bad bounces.

“At one point, the supervisor told me, ‘They’re playing everywhere on the outside courts in the same conditions.’ I said: ‘Yeah, but we are on a court with a roof, so why do you have the roof? What’s the point?’ In the end, they closed the roof, and I think it was better for everyone.”

Djokovic also shed further light on the thinking behind his decision to skip the Italian Open, which he has won six times, and where the courts most closely resemble those at Roland Garros, in favour of taking a wildcard for Geneva, a 250 event where he inevitably encountered a relatively modest level of opposition.

“It was a decision to play Madrid instead of Rome this year,” said Djokovic. “This year I wanted to play Madrid, I haven’t played in a while. I felt like I just didn’t want to play both, as I played Monte Carlo shortly after Miami.

“Geneva was not in the plans, it was not in the schedule. But I was talking with my team and decided to have that, because I didn’t have any – practically, only two – matches on clay. 

“I’m the type of player that is required to play a bit more in order to find the right game for clay. It doesn’t come as natural to me as maybe for some other guys. I rarely started really well on clay, if you analyse all of my seasons in my career. So it takes a little bit of time for me to get accustomed with the surface and movement and striking the ball. 

“I think it was a good move to go to Geneva, to be honest, because I was also struggling a little bit with my confidence level and doubting my game a bit. So it was good that I got four matches under my belt, won a title. Coming into Roland Garros, it feels different compared to the feeling I had three weeks ago. Let’s see how far I can go here, but I have a good feeling for now.”     

Already, Djokovic is beginning to look and sound more like his old self; whether he can ride those positive feelings to the business end of the fortnight remains to be seen.

The post Novak Djokovic: a riddle wrapped in a French Open mystery appeared first on Love Game Tennis.

He had been welcomed on to Court Philippe Chatrier with a thunderous and prolonged ovation. He had welled up repeatedly while delivering a touching and heartfelt speech in three different languages. He had been reunited with Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, his three greatest rivals. And he had received a special trophy commemorating the most absurd record in tennis or, perhaps, any other sport, namely the 14 French Open titles that made Roland Garros the only proper setting in which to celebrate his extraordinary career.

Throughout the special tribute ceremony held in his honour, the suited-and-booted Spaniard had just about held it together. True, he was obliged to wipe the moisture from his eyes almost as frequently as he once flicked the sweat from his brow in the heat of combat. But as befits a man who prevailed in all but four of his 116 outings in Paris, Nadal refused to succumb fully to the emotions swirling within.

Refused, that is, until the master of ceremonies announced there was one more surprise in store. With that, the 38-year-old was escorted to the side of the court by tournament director Amélie Mauresmo and Gilles Moretton, the president of the French Tennis Federation, where the clay was swept away to reveal a plaque bearing Nadal’s footprint, name and an image of the Coupe des Mousquetaires above the number 14. “Your footprint will stay here forever,” glossed the announcer, lest anyone should miss the significance of the moment.

It was the apex of an extraordinary afternoon, Nadal’s face crumpling with emotion as he embraced Morreton before gazing down at the homage with an expression of awed humility. He has often spoken of how he never saw himself as anything special, just an ordinary guy from Manacor who happened to be especially good at tennis. It was a refrain he returned to in a press conference afterwards. But at that moment, his face seemed to say, “All this – for me?” On the court where he was all but invincible, Nadal has never looked so lost.

By its very nature, clay is ephemeral. No one knows this better than Nadal, who spent two decades sliding his foot along the baseline between points, erasing ball marks from the red dirt. It was a futile exercise: Nadal’s imprint on the Parisian clay was always going to be unfading, with or without a commemorative plaque. Now, though, it will be indelible in the most literal sense. No wonder he looked overwhelmed.

“It has been an amazing surprise,” Nadal said later. “Honestly, I didn’t know anything about the ceremony. The only thing that I knew before going there was that there was going to be a video when I go on, then my speech and a couple of surprises, but they didn’t want me to tell me.

“When I saw that [plaque], I thought it was going to be just for this year. But knowing that’s going to be there forever is a present that I can’t describe in words. But for me it was, and it is, and it’s always going to be, a huge honour and very, very emotional to have this spot on the most important court of my tennis career, without a doubt. 

“It’s difficult to describe the feeling, but it’s something that really touched me. Very, very special.”

A special career deserved nothing less, and in that respect there was a feeling among many that Nadal’s sendoff at last November’s Davis Cup Finals in Malaga, where his final match ended with a straight-sets defeat to Botic van de Zandschulp, fell short. Conducted in Spanish before an adoring home crowd, that ceremony was touching enough, but not even a video montage featuring Federer, Djokovic, Murray and Serena Williams could prevent it from feeling like a domestic affair. 

If that was Nadal’s farewell to his nation, this was his farewell to the wider tennis world. 

An adieu to the Parisian crowd, most of whom had been given clay-coloured T-shirts bearing the date and the legend “Meric Rafa”, with the remainder donning white versions that formed a human mosaic spelling out “14 RG” alongside a trophy, and “RAFA” either side of two hearts.

A goodbye to his legion of English-speaking fans, for the benefit of whom he recalled his first visit to Paris in 2004, when he was unable to compete due to a foot injury, but nonetheless clambered to the top of Chatrier on crutches, surveying the clay-court kingdom he would start to rule the following year. 

A gracias to his family, to his pregnant wife, Mery, who cradled the couple’s two-year-old son in the stands, to his parents Ana María and Sebastián, to his nonagenarian grandmothers, and of course to his uncle, Toni, who moulded him into one of the greatest players of all time.

“Toni, you are the reason I am here,” said Nadal, choking with emotion as he looked up to his uncle, stationed in the stands close to his sister Maribel. “Thank you for devoting a large part of your life to being with me, coaching, talking, making me suffer, making me laugh, and also pushing me to my limits. 

“What we have lived was not always easy, but without a doubt it was worth it. You have been, without a doubt, the best coach I could have ever had in my career and in my life.”

Later, there was a word too for Federer, Djokovic and Murray, Nadal hailing their four-way rivalry as a model of ferocious competitive spirit allied with good sportsmanship. 

“After all these years fighting for everything, it’s unbelievable how time changes the perspective,” the champion of 22 majors told his former rivals after they emerged on court to a huge ovation. 

“All these nerves, pressure, strange feelings that you feel when we see each other, when we are really rivals – it’s completely different when you finish your career.

“At the end, now, it’s all about being happy about everything that we achieved. At the end, all of us achieved our dreams: we became tennis players, we played in the most important stadiums of our careers, and I think we built amazing rivalries, but in a good way. 

“I think we showed the world that we can fight as hard as possible, but in a good way, being good colleagues and respecting each other very well.”

Fittingly, though, the last word went to the city he held spellbound for the better part of two decades.

“Thank you France, thank you Paris,” said Nadal. “You have given me emotions and moments I could never have imagined. 

“You made me feel like a Frenchman. I can no longer play in front of you any more, but my heart and my memories will always be linked to this magical place.”

Much as the plaque that bears Nadal’s name and footprint will ensure memories of his epic feats will forever remain embedded in the clay, just where they belong.

The post Nadal bids Paris adieu in tearful French Open ceremony appeared first on Love Game Tennis.