Belarusian tennis player Arina Sabalenka won the Australian Open for the second time in a row

The winner of the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tournament this year, which is coming to an end in Melbourne, was the second racket of the world, Aryna Sabalenka. In the final, the 25-year-old tennis player from Belarus very confidently defeated Chinese Zheng Qingwen in two sets. This is the second Melbourne title in a row for Sabalenka, who has not dropped a set in seven matches played over two weeks.

Compared to last year’s Melbourne final between Arina Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, which was unpredictable in all respects and gave tennis connoisseurs two and a half hours of great fight, today’s final, of course, was inferior in all respects. In any case, intrigue was not visible in him from any angle. Already possessing a wealth of experience of big victories and bitter defeats, Sabalenka, as one might expect, left no chance for Zheng Qingwen, for whom the very act of reaching the decisive stage of the Grand Slam tournament was a fabulous success. The most powerful tennis player of the world elite bombed the other half of the court with aces and tormented her opponent with powerful attacks from the baseline, methodically eliminating the Chinese dream. The ratio of points won by knockout kicks is 19:14 in favor of Zheng Qingwen, which is paradoxical only at first glance. It’s just that she reached for the ball with her racket many times, having no real chance of hitting it into the court, while Sabalenka often didn’t bother herself with extra running around, realizing that victory would not escape her.

The Chinese woman’s chance lay in the fact that her opponent, who was sometimes prone to breakdowns due to a less stable psyche, would not be able to cope with the burden of responsibility.

You can find many similar stories in Sabalenka’s career, but in this case she controlled herself. Having held hers in the third game from 0:40, the Belarusian made it clear that Zheng Qingwen should not count on gifts and would have to forge her own success. But the Chinese woman did not have enough skill for this. She lost the first set quite quickly, and in the first game of the second game she made three double faults and finally said goodbye to her hopes for the title.

The last minutes of the game looked quite funny. Leading 5:2, Sabalenka earned a triple match point on her serve, but made two errors trying to end the match with blows, after which her opponent executed a thin shortened one. Then there was another unsuccessful match point for Sabalenka and even a break point for Zheng Qingwen, but all this only slightly delayed the outcome, which looked logical and inevitable.

As a result – 6:3, 6:2. The Chinese ward of the still very young 35-year-old Spanish coach Pere Riba, who in 2011 was the 66th racket in the world and, by the way, is directly related to last year’s progress of US Open champion Coco Gauff, lasted 1 hour 16 minutes. Considering the pre-match situation, this can be considered a definite achievement. An even greater success for Zheng Qingwen is her rise to seventh place in the world rankings. There are now seven Chinese representatives in the top hundred of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) classification, so we can talk about the transition from quantity to quality.

Sabalenka, however, has a much longer list of reasons to be proud. Firstly, no one has managed to defend the women’s title in Melbourne for more than ten years. The last tennis player to solve this problem was another Belarusian, Victoria Azarenka in 2013. Secondly, in seven matches Sabalenka gave away only 31 games. At the same time, she passed not the simplest grid. In the second round, the future champion’s opponent was the very talented Czech Brenda Fruhvirtova, in the 1/8 finals Sabalenka dealt with the dangerous American Amanda Anisimova, in the quarterfinals with the Czech Barbora Krejcikova, who has the 2021 Roland Garros champion title to her name, and in the semifinals with reigning US Open winner Coco Gauff beating her in the New York final.

All this, however, has not yet allowed Sabalenka to return to the top of the world rankings, where Iga Swiatek is still located. The gap between them is serious and amounts to approximately 900 points. But in February, the Polish tennis player will have to defend more than 1000 points at tournaments in Doha and Dubai. And if something goes wrong for Szwiatek, Sabalenka will have the opportunity to become number one in the world again.

Evgeniy Fedyakov