A crowded bracket at the top
Women’s field offering numerous storylines, including an intriguing first-round matchup
These merciless days in women’s tennis, Serena Williams’ latest push for a record-tying 24th Grand Slam title feels ever more crowded among story lines. As she begins, at age 38, her 74th Grand Slam tournament and her 19th Australian Open, the tour numbers tell a tale of a high-caliber chaos.
Since Williams won the Australian Open in January 2017 before a hiatus for pregnancy and giving birth on Sept. 1, 2017, there have been 11 Grand Slam tournaments won by nine women. The game has become such a conglomeration of capability that while four of those nine champions rank Nos. 1, 3, 4 and 6, five of them have gone banished down to Nos. 18, 25, 34, 35 and 45.
Beneath the overriding issue of air quality in a country ravaged by cataclysmic wildfires, the Australian Open women’s singles bracket has almost too much for any one mind to follow. This, of course, differs from the men’s side, where above the presences of 38-year-old Roger Federer and 33-year-old Rafael Nadal, plus the rising curiosity of No. 4 Daniil Medvedev, the U.S. Open finalist, the dominant story will be Novak Djokovic’s pursuit of a record-extending eighth Australian Open title.
That pursuit comes one year after Djokovic’s 6-3, 6-2, 6-3 win over Nadal in the final, in what Djokovic called “probably my most complete performance,” and which became arguably the best hard-court tennis ever played. It comes a week after Serbia’s win in the ATP Cup in Sydney, after which Djokovic said of the Australian Open, “I mean, it is the perfect preparation.”
Medvedev, the Russian who won admiration for his five-set marvel with Nadal in that U.S. Open final last September, reached the fourth round in Melbourne last year, but happens to open with someone who went one round further: Frances Tiafoe, the Maryland native who won’t be 22 until Monday.
All that feels like a measure of order, while among the women, there’s bustle even without the 19-yearold U.S. Open champion, No. 6 Bianca Andreescu, who withdrew with a knee injury. There’s ample bustle even beyond the absurd turn of the draw that placed Venus Williams and Coco Gauff, still 15 years old, in a first-round rematch of their first-round match at Wimbledon 2019, which began the budding, sprouting sensation around Gauff.
Serena Williams, Ashleigh Barty, Karolina Pliskova, Naomi Osaka, Simona Halep, Elina Svitolina, Belinda Bencic, Petra Kvitova, the departing Caroline Wozniacki . . . the subplots of possible winners pile up.
There’s Serena Williams, ranked No. 9 and fresh off Jan. 12, on which she won her first tournament title since returning from pregnancy, winning the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, and saying, “It’s been a long time. I think you can see the relief on my face.” Williams will start with No. 90 Anastasia Potapova of Russia, and with a possible fourth-round match against No. 3 Naomi Osaka, one of four women to defeat Williams in a Grand Slam final since the return of the superstar.
There’s a plight amid a large and curious trend as No. 1 Ashleigh Barty aims to kill off an old and decrepit sentence: No Australian woman has won the Australian Open since Chris O’Neil in 1978. Just as no Frenchwoman
has won the French Open since the Canadaborn, U.S.-raised Mary Pierce in 2000, and no British woman has won Wimbledon since Virginia Wade in 1977, it’s a story of homecountry pressures stacked against home-country support. For details, see some of the questions Johanna Konta, ranked No. 13, has faced as the Australia-born British hope.
Barty, the endearing 23year-old athlete’s athlete who had the famous hiatus spent playing cricket, seems to possess the stomach to bust this. Having won last year at Miami, the French Open, Birmingham and the WTA Finals in China, she tacked on her first title on Australian soil at Adelaide on Saturday and called it getting “the ball rolling” toward Melbourne. In November, in Shenzhen, China, she won those WTA Finals and said, “I’ve grown and developed so much since that fortnight in Miami,” where she won as a No. 12 seed.
Last time around, as she was just getting going, she ran into eventual finalist Kvitova, nowadays the No. 8 player in the world, in a quarterfinal Kvitova won 6-1, 6-4, after which Barty praised Kvitova and said, “I don’t think it was a slow start. I think it was a Petra start.”
Roaming down the list, Pliskova operates from the No. 2 spot as the best player of this moment yet to win a Grand Slam. She has reached one final (2016 U.S. Open) and two semifinals, including the 2019 Australian. No. 3 Osaka arrives with maybe the strangest 15Slam record ever: two titles and no other passage beyond any fourth round. She’s actually the defending champion whose 2019 Grand Slams from there went third round, first round and fourth round.
No. 4 Halep, the reigning Wimbledon champion, reached the Australian final and won the French Open in 2018. No. 5 Svitolina reached the last two Grand Slam semifinals, even if uncompetitive in those against Halep and Serena Williams. There’s the picturesque game of No. 7 Bencic, who followed her U.S. Open semifinal berth with a tournament win in Russia. While everyone is counting up the possibilities, no one will be discounting No. 8 Kvitova.
Then, as something to check in the early days, there’s a player who has announced her latter days: Wozniacki, the 2018 champion and former No. 1 who announced that this Grand Slam would be her last. At 29 and in her 51st Grand Slam tournament — after one win, two finals at U.S. Opens and four semifinals — she will open against Kristie Ahn, the American ranked No. 92. If No. 35-ranked Wozniacki gets by that, there might be a daunting second-rounder against No. 22 Dayana Yastremska, yet another player viewed as a possible threat in a field almost too loaded with them to ponder.