“If you had asked the ball, perhaps, to describe the women’s final of the Australian Open, between Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka, it might have reported more of the same: a beating,” louisahthomas writes.
You could be forgiven for guessing what was on Aryna Sabalenka’s mind. On Saturday, as the final of the Australian Open, in Melbourne, got under way, the Belarusian player looked nervous. In the third game of the match, after firing an ace to go up 40–0, she watched her lead slip away, gifting a break point to Elena Rybakina with a double fault, and then losing the game with a loose forehand.
Her shaky nerves seemed to infect her serve, the one shot a tennis player can fully control. In Australia last year, at a warmup tournament for the Australian Open, she hit twenty-one double faults in a loss, and topped double digits in double faults in every one of her matches at the Open—unheard-of numbers for a professional player, let alone one ranked second in the world.
It is a truism that the best tennis matches are contests between contrasting styles: aggressor versus defender, power versus guile. If you had asked the ball, perhaps, to describe the women’s final of the Australian Open, between Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka, it might have reported more of the same: a beating. Yet there was a thrilling dynamic tension to the match. It was apparent not only on the players’ faces—one emotional, one as inscrutable as stone—but also in their strokes.
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