Fernandez wins three-set thriller to advance to final
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 Belarussian 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 secondranked player in the world demoralized, and with two broken racquets to show for it. It is, in a word, nuts.
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 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 quarterfinal 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.”