Turning back time
Rejuvenated Williams chases record as rematch with Osaka approaches
MELBOURNE, Australia — Entertainment options are limited in a lockdown, but Naomi Osaka had concrete plans for her Tuesday night.
After she extended her winning streak to 19 matches by beating Hsieh Su-wei of Taiwan to advance to the semifinals of the Australian Open, Osaka said she planned to stay up to watch the evening match between Serena Williams and Simona Halep, though not necessarily to find out whom she would face next.
“I always watch Serena play,” Osaka said.
The Serena Williams she will face Thursday is a legend suddenly in sync with her distant past. The veteran competitor on display in a near-empty Rod Laver Arena bore little resemblance to the Williams who Osaka beat in straight sets in the 2018 U.S. Open final or to the one Halep humbled in the 2019 Wimbledon final. If Osaka dreamed of facing Williams at her best here, she fell asleep happy.
Williams’ 6-3, 6-3 quarterfinal victory was not as surgical as the dismemberment that Halep administered to her in that meeting at Wimbledon, a performance that Billie Jean King described as “one of the most perfectly executed matches I’ve ever seen.”
On Tuesday, Williams put only 55 percent of her first serves in play, a much lower rate than she expects of herself. She finished with more unforced errors (33) than winners (24). But on the key points, Williams’
moxie and motor won the day.
With Halep serving at 3-3 in the second set, Williams won a 20-stroke rally to earn a break point, then secured the break on a 12-shot point. Two days after she was extended to three intense sets and more than two hours by Aryna Sabalenka, Williams, 39, was spry enough to outrun and outlast Halep, who is 10 years younger.
“I feel pretty good with that performance,” Williams said. “I feel like I needed to have a good performance, obviously, today, especially after my last match against her.”
The 2019 Wimbledon final was the third of four Grand Slam finals that Williams has played since she won the 2017 Australian Open to pull within one major title of equaling the career record held by Margaret Court.
She is one successful match from earning another shot at Court’s record, and to get there Williams has one more date on her revenge tour. After dispatching the secondranked Halep, the thirdranked Osaka awaits Thursday.
In other women’s singles action, No. 25-seeded Karolina Muchova upset topranked Ash Barty 1-6, 6-3, 6-2 in the quarterfinals.
Muchova earned her second semifinal berth in a Grand Slam, and her comeback win ended Barty’s bid to become the first Australian woman to win the title since Chris O’Neil in 1978. She will face No. 22-seeded Jennifer Brady, who beat fellow American Jessica Pegula 4-6, 6-2, 6-1.
As Williams became more and more famous for her rocket serve and guided-missile groundstrokes, she lost sight of the fact that before she was a champion, she was a grinder. The coronavirus pandemic, now in its second lap around the calendar, has given Williams, like so many others, ample time for reflection.
And what she realized, she said Tuesday, was this: “I’m good at rallying, and I have to embrace the things I’m good at. I’m good at playing power, I’m good at hitting a hundred balls. And that’s one thing that’s unique about me that I just need to kind of accept and embrace and just be good at both.”
Osaka was not alone in keeping a close watch on Williams’ match. No fans were allowed inside Rod Laver Arena because of a fiveday lockdown imposed after Australian authorities detected a cluster of coronavirus infections in the area. But Williams and Halep had a crowd of roughly five dozen spectators anyway, as people associated with the tournament slipped into seats to watch in-person with the players’ entourages.
Since Williams last won a Grand Slam title, a lot of the attention in women’s tennis has shifted to Osaka. In 2020, she supplanted Williams as the highest-earning woman in sports on the strength of more than $30 million in off-court endorsements. Her rise led a reporter to ask how she was dealing with being seen as the face of women’s tennis.
“As long as Serena’s here,” Osaka replied, “I think she’s the face of women’s tennis.”
Thursday’s meeting with Osaka will be Williams’ 40th Grand Slam semifinal. It also will be her first time squaring off against Osaka in a Grand Slam event since their 2018 final in New York, a match that turned turbulent when Williams argued with the chair umpire, who called three code-of-conduct violations against her. The incident turned the crowd against the umpire and, indirectly, Osaka, souring her moment of victory.
In the afterglow of her quarterfinal win, Williams’ smile didn’t waver when she was asked about her relationship with Osaka.
“I think we both have had closure,” Williams said of the 2018 final. She added, “I think she’s a great competitor and a cool cat.”
Williams and Osaka might have squared off in another U.S. Open final last year if not for the heel injury that hampered Williams in her semifinal loss to Victoria Azarenka. Unlike Osaka, who skipped last fall’s rescheduled French Open because of a strained hamstring, Williams played at Roland Garros less than three weeks after the Open. She won her first match before pulling out of the tournament, a decision that proved providential.
When the start of the Australian Open was pushed back three weeks because of the pandemic, Williams had three open months on her calendar, a welcome block of time that she used to heal and improve her conditioning.
The daily conditioning grind she endured through November and December has allowed Williams to run down balls and extend rallies. While she is known for her attacking style, her best offense in her past two matches has been defense.
“It’s much easier for her to hit the balls,” Halep said. “It’s tougher for the opponents to finish the point.”