British success
Edmund and Konta march on
Glass half-full or half-empty? A pessimist might see Johanna Konta’s first-round match against Natalia Vikhlyantseva as further evidence of her recent shakiness under pressure, given that she needed six match points to close out victory.
An optimist, on the other hand, would view this as the perfect start.
Konta’s struggles have been temperamental rather than technical, so to test herself out with a few early mini-crises was the smart way to go, rather like an arachnophobe seeking to cure their affliction by handling critters of increasing size and hairiness.
Admittedly, Konta’s travails were self-inflicted. She had seemed to be running away with a routine win when she led 4-2 in the second set. But two chances to score a second break slipped away as Vikhlyantseva landed a pair of ferocious forehand winners. Then all the doubts that Konta keeps locked away in the cellar of her consciousness began to leak out through the keyhole.
There were double-faults; stiff-wristed drop-shots that died in the net; misjudged Hawk-eye challenges, some attempted while the rally was still going, so that the point was forfeited.
Some of this may have been prompted by Vikhlyantseva’s devil-may-case looseness, which makes her an awkward, streaky opponent. But she also comes across as a very young 21-year-old. After each error, she slumps her shoulders like a teenager told to tidy her room.
Mentally, she was barely present for much of the second set. But Konta’s acts of self-sabotage were so blatant that Vikhlyantseva perked up and sniffed a comeback. The fans on Court No 2 also roused themselves. Konta is the only Briton in either singles draw who has ever reached the second week here and they were determined to cheer her through to the next round.
The tenth game of the second set proved to be the crux of the matter, as Konta had to fend off a pair of set points. She held her nerve, doing the basics right and allowing Vikhlyantseva to take the risks. This time, the self-destruct came at the far end of the court.
These moments found the crowd holding their breath. They were the tennis equivalent of a London Zoo tarantula walking up your arm. For had Konta gone to a third set against a player with Vikhlyantseva’s unpredictable armoury, anything could have happened. A first-round loss against the world No103 would have been catastrophic.
Konta must have been aware that she has a massive 780 ranking points to defend here, around two fifths of her overall total. A slip-up would have sent her scooting down the ladder, and maybe even out of the top 50. As it is, she has a winnable meeting with Dominika Cibulkova tomorrow and a hardfought victory on which to build.
No wonder Konta was unusually chipper in the interview room afterwards. “It’s the tough matches,” she said, “where there’s quite a bit of ebb and flow, when you save set points or you save break points, those are the matches where you come away feeling quite tough.
“Matches where things are a lot more straightforward for you, obviously you take the good things from that, maybe the level you played. But in terms of the way you competed out there, matches like these ask a lot more of you.
“It would have been easy to get discouraged when I got broken at 4-3 after coming so close to breaking her again at 4-2. I think the way
‘I think the way I competed and just kept going after every point, I can take a lot from that’
I competed and the way I just kept going after every single point, I can take a lot from that.”
On paper, Cibulkova represents a tough second-round draw. The benefit of being a seed is supposed to be that you do not have to play any other seed until the third round. But Cibulkova, the world No32, only missed out on that honour because Serena Williams was fast-tracked in ahead of her.
Still, tennis is a sport of matchups and Konta’s confident press-conference tone suggests she feels good about her chances. Cibulkova is a road-runner rather than a big puncher and Konta has won their past two meetings – both on hard courts – without dropping a set.
“I’m looking forward to it,” said Konta. “She’s probably one of the best competitors on tour, a feisty player. It will be a great test for me. I have to focus on controlling what I can, accept that she’s going to fight her way into some points and really stay there until the very end.”