Karolina Pliskova, the No. 1 women’s singles seed at the United States Open, was beaten in the second round by Caroline Garcia, 6-1, 7-6 (2), on Wednesday.
A significant upset on paper, it was no great surprise in the grand scheme of women’s tennis, which has become a free-for-all in recent seasons.
Garcia, a powerful French player with a complete game, was once ranked as high as No. 4 in 2018. She already had split her previous six matches with Pliskova, and though she arrived unseeded at this Grand Slam tournament, she was the more consistent and resourceful player in Louis Armstrong Stadium.
“I knew I could give her trouble for sure,” Garcia said of Pliskova, whom she had not faced since 2018. “She gets a lot of confidence from her serve, so I was trying to be really focused on the return and trying to make as many returns as I could.”
Pliskova, a flat-hitting and big-serving Czech, arrived in New York with a big opportunity with six of the world’s top 10 players missing, including No. 1 Ashleigh Barty and No. 2 Simona Halep.
But Pliskova, who reached the 2016 U.S. Open final after upsetting Serena Williams, remains perhaps the most accomplished women’s player without a Grand Slam singles title. Though she was one of the first top European players to commit to making the trip to the United States and playing in New York amid the coronavirus pandemic, she ended up losing early in both tournaments in which she played. She lost her opening match of the Western & Southern Open to Veronika Kudermetova on Aug. 23.
“None of those matches which I lost was that bad,” Pliskova said. “I think there are just some girls which are playing good tennis. I think Garcia is one of them.”
After a first round that was surprisingly stable with the top 24 seeds all advancing, the women’s tournament returned to its more usual unpredictability on Wednesday. Four of the top 16 seeds were beaten in the second round: Pliskova, No. 11 Elena Rybakina, No. 12 Marketa Vondrousova and No. 13 Alison Riske.
Pliskova’s defeat leaves two American women as the top remaining seeds: No. 2 Sofia Kenin and No. 3 Williams, who is chasing a record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title.
But instability has been the rule, with five different women winning the last five Grand Slam singles titles before the coronavirus pandemic forced the tour’s five-month hiatus. Since the start of 2017, there have been eight first-time major singles champions. By comparison, there have been no first-time singles champions during that period in the men’s game.
Another women’s surprise would thus not be one in New York, particularly with players coming off an extended break.
Garcia could not play tennis at all when the hiatus began. She was training in Spain at Rafael Nadal’s academy in Majorca when Spain and much of Europe went into lockdown in March. Unable to fly back home to her home city of Lyon, France, she remained in Majorca in an apartment with her parents and was not allowed to train outdoors or play tennis for several weeks.
She exercised indoors instead, ran up and down the stairs in her apartment complex and passed the downtime by doing a puzzle of a Fiat 500.
“You have to try to have a bit of imagination,” she said then in an interview with the French newspaper L’Équipe. “For the moment, the priority is not to go out, to not do sports outside, to not play tennis.”
But she is certainly playing it well at this unusual U.S. Open and has yet to drop a set in two matches, dictating terms with her heavy serve and topspin forehand.
“Against the top players if you sit back and wait for the mistake, it’s never going to happen,” Garcia said of her aggressive approach. “You have to put her in trouble.”
After soaring through the first set, Garcia had to scrap to win the second, saving a set point on her serve.
“I thought she played great tennis in the first set, she was just playing super aggressive, going for her shots,” Pliskova said. “I maybe didn’t play my best. I didn’t serve that great, especially early in the match. But that’s how it is sometimes. I’m not a robot, so I don’t have to play every day amazing.”
Garcia can surely relate to that comment. From No. 4, she has fallen to No. 50. But despite the hiatus, she has had some big highs in the last 12 months, helping France win the Fed Cup in 2019 and now beating the No. 1 seed at the U.S. Open. When she closed it out, she performed her trademark tennis celebration borrowed from soccer: spreading her arms to imitate an airplane.
“My personal thing,” Garcia said. “The strangest thing is at the end of the match, you’re used to there being some acknowledgment from the crowd, so you’re not entirely sure that you’ve won.”
Continuing her run will require her to defeat another player on a roll with a big serve and heavy topspin forehand. Her third-round opponent will be Jennifer Brady, the much-improved American who won her first WTA title last month at the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., and made impressively quick work of Cici Bellis on Wednesday.
“I think we have pretty much the same weapons: the serve and the forehand,” Garcia said. “She is moving well on court and is playing in her country, even if it’s without fans.”
Source: Tennis - nytimes.com
