Tennis player Ekaterina Alexandrova defeated Iga Swiatek at the Miami Open

The main sensation of the Miami Open, an ongoing Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) 1000 category tournament in Florida with a prize fund of $8.7 million, was the victory of Russian Ekaterina Alexandrova, ranked 16th in the world ranking, over its undisputed leader Iga Swiatek. The Polish tennis player, who lost to Anna Kalinska in February in Dubai, suffered her second consecutive setback in matches against the Russians. Alexandrova, having dealt with the first racket of the world in two games in less than an hour and a half, for the second year in a row reached the quarterfinals of this prestigious competition, where she will now meet with another elite opponent, American Jessica Pegula.

For the vast majority of Russian tennis players, the current Miami Open was unsuccessful. For example, the 11th racket of the world Daria Kasatkina, who currently occupies the highest place among them in the ranking, was eliminated already in the 1/16 finals, and Anna Kalinskaya, who scored 1422 points in the first three months of the season, which none of her compatriots achieved since 2015, and is still in the top eight according to this indicator, due to illness she was unable to enter the 1/8 final match against the Greek Maria Sakkari.

Before her meeting with Iga Šwiątek, Ekaterina Alexandrova, frankly speaking, also had little hope. Having long since become a prominent figure in women’s tennis and finishing in the top twenty for the third season in a row, Alexandrova has earned herself a reputation as a tennis player who rarely makes it far into the brackets of major competitions. Suffice it to say that at the Grand Slam championships she reached the 1/8 finals only once, last year at Wimbledon, and in the 1000 category competitions she has a semi-final in Madrid the season before last and last year’s quarter-final in Miami. As a rule, Alexandrova earns rating points at smaller tournaments, where the stakes, and therefore the level of competition, are lower. For example, in January before the Australian Open, at a competition in Adelaide, she confidently defeated Elena Rybakina from Kazakhstan, at that time the third racket in the world. As for Iga Swiatek, out of four previous meetings with her, the Russian won only one, the very first three years ago, and lost in the rest.

However, the 84 minutes spent on Monday evening on the center court of the Miami Open became Alexandrova’s finest hour.

It was a classic situation in which the uncertainty of one opponent was superimposed on the perfect game of the other. The only surprising thing is that Szwiatek, the recent champion of Indian Wells, looked confused in this case, who remains the undisputed leader of the WTA rankings and, based on the results of the Miami Open, will be ahead of her closest pursuer, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, by 2790 points (despite the fact that, say, victory in the tournaments A Grand Slam is worth 2000 points).

Apparently, two factors were at play. Firstly, on Sunday the Polish woman played a very difficult match with an extremely uncomfortable opponent for herself – the Czech Linda Noskova, who beat her at the Australian Open, and in Miami forced her to give it her all, resisting for almost two and a half hours. Secondly, Alexandrova not only chose the right tactics, but also adhered to it very clearly, acting extremely aggressively both on her own and on someone else’s serve, going inside the court before receiving to speed up the rally and leaving her opponent no chance with her trademark flat shots.

The result was 6:4, 6:2, and during the entire match the winner did not allow the loser to make a single break. It is significant that approximately the same fearless tennis was demonstrated by Anna Kalinskaya in the semi-finals of the February tournament in Dubai, who then also beat Szwiatek in two games. The Polish player will now prepare for the European clay series, which she completed last season with a victory at the French Open, scoring a total of 3,335 points in two months. On Wednesday, Alexandrova will face another difficult test – a meeting with the fifth racket of the world, American Jessica Pegula, who defeated her compatriot Emma Navarro in two sets. In their only previous meeting, held in 2021 on Roman clay, little worked for the Russian.

Evgeniy Fedyakov