Osaka, Halep avoid upsets
PARIS — Naomi Osaka’s body language made her plight plain. For all she’s already accomplished, the internal pressure stemming from aiming to do even more was ruining her debut as the No. 1 seed at a Grand Slam tournament.
Fed up with her poor play in a first-round match at the French Open — errors off Osaka’s racket gave her opponent her first 30 points Tuesday — she missed yet another shot. She was within a game of losing. Osaka wheeled around to look at her box and display what seemed to be a sarcastic thumbs-up.
“Definitely sarcastic. I was kind of thinking: ‘Do you guys see this amazing tennis I’m playing right here? Thumbs-up.’ I don’t even know what I wanted them to do. I felt kind of bad after I did it. It was more like I had to put my emotions somewhere,” Osaka said. “It’s one of those matches where you’re not playing well, but you have to find a way to win. For me, I’ve just begun learning how to do that.”
Five times just two points from defeat in a swirling wind, Osaka held it together enough to overcome all of those miscues and stretch her winning streak at majors to 15 matches by eventually beating 90th-ranked Anna Karolina Schmiedlova of Slovakia 0-6, 7-6 (4), 6-1.
As she got going, Osaka delivered a pinpoint crosscourt forehand that was too hard to handle, then looked at her box again, this time with a pumping clenched left fist. Afterward, she acknowledged having jitters as she pursues a third consecutive major title while topping the seedings.
“I feel like I’m thinking too much about the number next to my name right now, instead of feeling free and having fun like I normally do in Grand Slams,” Osaka said. “The reason that I wasn’t moving my feet is because I was super nervous, super stressed.”
Defending champion Simona Halep could relate.
Starting her first defense of a Slam title, she also turned in an uneven performance and needed three sets to get by 47th-ranked Ajla Tomljanovic 6-2, 3-6, 6-1.
“I need to be calm. Just focused on my game. Not thinking about my opponents and not thinking about the result,” said Halep, who was a runner-up twice in Paris before earning the trophy in 2018.
Clay has never been Osaka’s best surface; her powerbased style is more suited to hard courts, such as those at the U.S. Open, which she won last September, or the Australian Open, which she won in January to become the first tennis player from Japan to be ranked No. 1.
Yet after having a career record of 9-11 on clay entering this season, she is 8-1 on the slow stuff in 2019. She talked about feeling more and more comfortable on the surface and assured everyone that the abdominal and thumb injuries she’d dealt with in recent weeks were no longer any issue.
But nothing seemed right at the outset against Schmiedlova, who has never been past the third round at a major and is 6-15 in openers.
Schmiedlova’s first 30 points came via 18 unforced errors and 12 forced errors by Osaka — and zero winners of her own.
By the end, Osaka won despite 38 unforced errors,
24 more than her foe. She’ll probably want to play better in her next match, against two-time Australian Open champion and former No. 1 Victoria Azarenka.
“It’s going to be exciting for me,” said Azarenka, who eliminated 2017 French Open winner Jelena Ostapenko
6-4, 7-6 (4). “I love to challenge myself against the best players.”