Serena digs deep to move on at French
PARIS — After playing so infrequently, it’s as if Serena Williams is starting from scratch.
Sure looked that way for a bit more than a half-hour in the French Open’s second round on Thursday, when she dealt with muscle soreness, a lack of verve and a bunch of mistakes. So many mistakes.
And then, suddenly, after unleashing one particularly powerful backhand return winner that she punctuated with a shout, Williams was back. She was animated. Determined. Dominant, even. Shaking off some rust in her first Grand Slam tournament since giving birth nine months ago, Williams recalibrated her shots and erased a deficit of a set and a break to beat 17thseeded Ashleigh Barty of Australia 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 in a match that ended shortly before dusk.
“I lost the first set, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to try harder. I’ve got to just try harder,” she told the crowd afterward. “And Serena came out.” Well put. Williams had all sorts of trouble in the opening set, compiling 12 unforced errors. By the time the second set was merely one game old, she had been broken twice in the match, each time at love, a rather surprising development for the owner of one of her sport’s most dangerous serves.
Her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, attributed much of the poor start to this outing coming about 48 hours after the first match of her comeback following a two-month break. She arrived in Paris having played only four matches all season.
Next for Williams is a third-round match against 11thseeded Julia Goerges of Germany.
Get through that, and Williams would face either five-time major champion Maria Sharapova or 2016 U.S. Open runner-up Karolina Pliskova. Williams beat Pliskova’s twin sister, Kristyna, in the first round in Paris.
There were, to be sure, plenty of other big names in action Thursday, including victories for Sharapova, No. 1-ranked Simona Halep and 10-time men’s champion Rafael Nadal.
But the 2018 French Open is, first and foremost, about Williams and her return to a Grand Slam stage.
“She’s not quite at the level she was when she was at her best, but that’s normal. That’s expected,” Barty said. “But her level when she’s not quite on her best is still bloody good.”