Konta turns on magic in Miami
Briton beats world No 5 to carve out a piece of history in Florida
If the 2016 tennis season established Johanna Konta as a top-10 talent, 2017 finds her evolving into a serious contender for major titles. At the Miami Open yesterday, Konta beat world No5 Simona Halep to become the first British woman to reach the semi-finals here.
On another humid and stifling Florida afternoon, Konta produced a stirring comeback to edge this lengthy contest by a 3-6, 7-6, 6-2 scoreline.
“I had to go off court after the second set to change my clothes,” she said. “They weighed about five kilos with all the sweat – it was quite gross!”
Konta’s victory was well timed, given that she will soon find herself in Halep’s home town – Constanta, on the shores of the Black Sea – for a Fed Cup play-off that could restore Great Britain to the World Group for the first time since 1993.
Halep will be leading the Romanian team, and it will be interesting to see how she performs. Last week, she admitted that the responsibility was already making her nervous.
A former French Open finalist from 2014, Halep has most of the ingredients that make up a champion. Her strokes are technically pure and her greatest asset is her bewildering foot speed. But she admits that she finds it difficult to stay mentally upbeat under pressure.
Yesterday she should really have served out for victory at 5-4 in the second set. Fortunately for Konta, she is prone to tightening up at such moments, which is exactly what happened here.
When she called her coach, Darren Cahill, on for a pep talk at the end of that set, she spent most of the conversation berating him for shaking his head whenever she missed a shot.
“My confidence went down because I don’t have many matches this year,” Halep said afterwards, “and she has more matches than me so she is in the rhythm.
“All the time I put myself down during the points, during the match. It is just my personality to be hard with myself. But I can say that I am better than before and I am working on it.”
A change of mentality is always possible: the story of Konta herself demonstrates that. Until around two years ago, she was a fringe player, ranked well outside the top 100 and playing her trade at second-tier tournaments from Quebec to Albuquerque. But then she learnt to quieten the inner voices of doubt, and her graph has been pointing upwards ever since.
Admittedly, she might have dropped out of the top 10 since the start of the season, but only to No11. And she can recapture the No 10 spot if she wins her semi-final here in the small hours of tomorrow morning.
Konta’s own on-court coaching visit from Wim Fissette – who happens to have spent a year working with Halep in 2014 – was contrastingly serene. “When he came on I had completely lost the score,” she said. “I guess I had bit of a mental wander. But it’s also a good thing to be very present in the actual work and not so much the scoreline. He was laughing about it.”
Konta brushed aside any suggestion that she might have gained inside information from Fissette, saying: “There are a lot of coaches on Tour that have worked with other players as well.”
In fact, it was her own ingenuity that turned the match around after a disappointing first set, in which Halep defended superbly and refused to be broken down from the baseline.
Her solution was to start mixing up her options. She broke in the opening game via a sequence of drop shots, net rushes and volleys.
While hardly a natural at the net, Konta does at least have the nous to move forward and apply pressure. Halep, by contrast, could have been wearing a diving belt, so deep did she stay at all times.
Konta came to Miami without an enormous number of matches behind her in the last month, having picked up a foot issue during the Fed Cup qualifiers in Tallinn, and then lost to world No25 Caroline Garcia at Indian Wells.
But this deep run confirms her consistency of performance, and
her deserved place against the game’s elite.
She might not have become a major champion yet, but her rivals are increasingly wary of her resilience and firepower.
Serena Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, admitted as much in Melbourne two months ago, when Williams eliminated Konta in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open. “Serena had to step up today,” he said, “because Konta was setting the bar really, really high.”
Meanwhile, Jamie Murray and his partner Bruno Soares went out in the quarter-finals of the doubles after a champions’ tie-break against Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo, losing by a 2-6, 6-3, 10-8 margin.
Fabio Fognini moved into the semi-finals of the men’s singles – his best run at a Masters event for four years – by beating a less-than-100per-cent Kei Nishikori in straight sets 6-4, 6-2.
Nishikori’s wrist injury means that Stan Wawrinka is the only member of the men’s top five to be fit at present.