By Giri Nathan
After two Roland-Garros semifinals this harrowing and high-level, it’s hard to believe there’s another match in store. A final? What’s left to say? The big plot twist already came on Thursday. For a while it felt as though this whole tournament was just a formality, building heat for an inexorable clash between No. 1 Iga Swiatek and No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka, neither of whom had dropped a set through five rounds. Nobody told unseeded Karolina Muchova that that was the grand plan. Savvy move by nobody. Because Muchova instead found herself battling with Sabalenka for three hours and 13 minutes in possibly the most end-to-end entertaining match of 2023 and taking a 7–6(5), 6–7(5), 7–5 victory with an abrupt conquest of the last five games.
As a longtime appreciator could tell you, and as a new set of eyeballs could figure out within 10 minutes of watching her on court, the 26-year-old Muchova has been lavished with every tennis gift there is—except good health. She tends to reveal all those gifts in the span of a few points: otherworldly hands, a precise slice, all the power the modern game requires, and—my personal favorite—the ability to sneak up to the net in a way that startles me every single time, only for that decision to look obvious and essential as soon as she’s knifed the winning volley. She’s one of those players who are always seeing something that we don’t. You feel lucky that they can show it to you. Karolina Muchova and Ons Jabeur help fill the Ashleigh Barty-shaped void on the WTA, holding it down for all players with freakish hand-eye coordination and a sense of spontaneity.
Injuries have interfered with Muchova’s entire tennis life, and her 2022 season in particular. Last year in the third round at Roland-Garros she rolled her ankle so badly she had to be wheeled off the court. But she’s got a No. 19 ranking, an Australian Open semifinal, and two Wimbledon quarterfinals in her past. Given her present ranking of No. 43, Muchova came into this fortnight unseeded. This meant that she was liable to ruin some highly seeded player’s day. That player turned out to be Maria Sakkari, the No. 8 seed, who might have assumed that her hard-earned position earned her a chill first-round matchup, but instead got booted by Muchova in straights. She kept it moving, eventually taking out a resurgent Nastia Pavlyuchenkova in the fourth round before sizing up Sabalenka, the player of the present moment, who has profitably imported her hard-court dominance onto clay.
What a matchup it was. Muchova has the whole tool belt. Sabalenka is content with just her sledgehammer. You can see the merits to both approaches. The two players hovered around their peak tennis for the bulk of the match and drew brilliance out of each other. Muchova’s down-the-line backhand to cement the first-set tiebreak, in particular, will be rattling around my head for a while, as will her 21 successes in 28 forays to the net and her deft work returning one of the game’s biggest serves. Sabalenka will likely be haunted by the match’s conclusion. She led 5–2 in the final set, with Muchova’s legs clearly faltering from fatigue. What happened next is difficult to describe, though “choke” would be perfectly fair. Sabalenka tightened up exactly when victory seemed to be falling into her lap, made a heap of errors, and permitted Muchova enough time to find her legs and her game again, which she did happily, charging through five straight games.
One impressive record was broken here: Sabalenka is now 12–1 at Slams this season. And one other perfect record survived the contest: Muchova is now a lifetime 5–0 when playing top-three players. On Saturday she will test that record again as she faces No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who looked as focused and merciless as ever in her semifinal defeat of Beatriz Haddad Maia and has now won 13 consecutive matches at Roland-Garros.
Above: Karolina Muchova gives the “Academy Salute” after defeating Aryna Sabalenka yesterday. (Getty)
