CANADA’S FERNANDEZ IN FINAL.
CANADIAN PHENOM OUSTS NO. 2 SEED AT U.S. OPEN
There has been much talk at the U.S. Open over the Cinderella run of Canadian teenager Leylah Fernandez.
On Thursday night at Arthur Ashe Stadium, it looked more like David versus Goliath.
Facing the world number two Aryna Sabalenka, a 23-year-old Belarusian who looked ready to blast the much smaller and younger Montrealer off the court, Fernandez instead used a tremendous display of guile and skill to fight her way back into their semi-final match in New York.
It was, as has been the case for the entire Grand Slam tournament, a display of guile and skill that utterly belies her age — she just turned 19 on Monday — and inexperience.
Fernandez fought back from a first-set hole to win it in a tiebreaker, dropped the second set when Sabalenka raised her level of play, and then, with it all to play for in a deciding third set, the Canadian simply played defence, kept herself in points, and let her far more experienced opponent make costly mistakes.
After Fernandez went up 5-4 in the set on some lovely shotmaking, Sabalenka’s cannon serve fell apart, giving away the game, and the match, to a player who was close to unknown two weeks ago. Four straight wins against big-name opponents, all of them in three sets. Three of those wins against top-ten players.
How did she do it?
“I have no idea,” she said on the court in a television interview. Fernandez gave thanks to the New York crowd, which was frankly unnecessary. She earned this win, again, by just playing incredible tennis — all the more incredible for the fact that she just hadn’t done this kind of thing before. Honestly, who does this? After the first few games against Sabalenka she looked exhausted, overmatched, and overpowered. And she won, leaving the second-ranked player in the world demoralized, and with two broken rackets to show for it. It is, in a word, nuts.
That first set, as has seemingly been the case in all of Fernandez’s matches since she started defeating top-ten players and former U.S. Open champions in New York, was an epic battle all on its own. Sabalenka started out booming her serves, winning 12 of the first 13 points on her serve as she launched blasts all over the court. In one game alone while racing out to a 4-1 lead, Sabalenka landed a serve at 118 miles per hour, another at 114, and another at 110. Fernandez struggled to even return them, let alone return them aggressively. It looked like, after three straight shocking wins, Fernandez had finally run out of surprises against a veteran who was playing some of the best tennis of her life.
And then, in a blink, Fernandez found a surprise. She threw a quick service game of her own at Sabalenka, including two second-serve aces — the unicorns of the WTA tour — to get the set to 2-4. That figurative punch to Sabalenka’s nose seemed to rattle her, and the inconsistency that has kept her from becoming a Slam champion came back to her game. She double-faulted twice and blew a couple of forehands to hand a service break to Fernandez, something that seemed unthinkable when she was firing howitzers a couple of games earlier.
The pair remained on serve until a first-set tiebreaker, and again, it was far from simple. The Canadian dropped the first two points, then landed a beauty of a second serve and then essentially let Sabalenka beat herself. She blew a forehand return on a Fernandez second serve to fall behind in the tiebreak, added another double fault, and hit a long return as Fernandez took the tiebreak by a score of 7-3.
It is worth noting here that Fernandez was just 15-12 in her first full season on the WTA tour before arriving in New York. She was a promising player, but she was nobody’s idea of a pressure performer with a game that was ready to scare some of the best of the women’s game. In the space of a week, though, she had built a reputation as someone who would simply not wobble in the biggest
I THINK IT’S SOMETHING FROM INSIDE OF ME.
moments of a match. It was Fernandez, the kid who had won exactly one Slam match before last week, who kept displaying remarkable poise and confidence — with a touch of brashness as she played to the raucous Ashe crowd.
She was asked after her quarter-final win about seeming to feed off the big stage, and she said she had no answer for it.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “From a very young age I think it’s something from inside of me, because from a very young age I’ve always wanted to be on the first court playing in front of parents.”
She wanted to show off for the grown-ups when she was just a little kid, and now here she was showing off, still not much more than a kid, at the biggest tennis stadium in the world.
Two years ago, a Canadian 19-year-old won the biggest match in the country’s tennis history to win the U.S. Open in New York. But Bianca Andreescu had a loaded, if short, resume.
Leylah Fernandez will try on Saturday to pull off an even bigger Canadian surprise.
Would you bet against her?