WIMBLEDON, England — The quarterfinal everyone expected, a dream battle pitting newly minted women’s No. 1 Ashleigh Barty against Serena Williams, seemed oh-so-very-close as play began at the All England Club on Monday morning.
Williams seemed a safe bet to do her part. She was facing Carla Suárez Navarro, to whom she had never lost a set in six previous matches.
All Barty, playing two hours before Williams, had to do was emerge victorious from her match against Alison Riske, an unheralded American veteran who was ranked 55th and had never made so much as a dent at a tennis Grand Slam event.
But Riske had other plans.
A 29-year-old Pittsburgh native with an energetic personality and a punishing game on grass, Riske upset Barty, 3-6, 6-2, 6-3, setting the tone for long stretches with hard, flat groundstrokes and aggressive volleys.
She now plays Williams, who did indeed dispatch Suárez, 6-2, 6-2. And after yet another day of plot twists in the women’s draw, Williams has suddenly emerged as a favorite to win the tournament. Possibly, the favorite.
With the losses of Barty, No. 3 Karolina Pliskova and No. 6 Petra Kvitova on Monday, the top six women’s seeds have been eliminated. And Riske, who has beaten three seeded players already, is vowing to keep slaying seeds.
“I’m here to stay!” Riske said, barely able to hide her happiness. “The fact that it’s at Wimbledon, my favorite Grand Slam, the place that I had always dreamed to be in the last eight, they can’t kick me out now.”
She is in a major quarterfinal for the first time in her career, but she initially looked as if she would be overwhelmed Monday.
Barty started off by striking four clean aces, each straight down the T, the last a 108 m.p.h.- fastball. She brimmed with confidence, understandably so. She had entered this fourth-round fight riding a 15-match winning streak during which she won the French Open and a Wimbledon tuneup tournament. In the process, she became the first Australian woman since Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1976 to be ranked No. 1.
As Barty took the first set in an efficient 32 minutes, it looked as if her winning streak would grow and she would soon secure her spot in the quarterfinals.
But Riske has been a strong grass-court player throughout her career and won a tournament on the surface last month.
She gathered herself and began imposing her will, continuously blasting hard, flat, deep groundstrokes, playing often to Barty’s dangerous backhand. Riske put the pressure on her top-ranked opponent by coming to net 27 times and winning 74 percent of those points.
Barty seemed about to edge ahead early in the third set after earning a break point. But Riske fought off the danger with a tightrope rally that she finished off with a backhand volley winner. Not long afterward she served for the match, winning it after forcing a Barty groundstroke to fall meekly wide.
“I didn’t play a poor match,” Barty said. “When I needed to, when the big moments were there, Alison played better. Tough one to swallow, but I lost to a better player.”
Riske is not usually better than Barty — her career-high ranking is No. 36, in 2017 — but on this day she certainly competed with more fire.
“The biggest key for me has just been to battle from start to finish of every match that I’ve been a part of,” Riske said, speaking of a run here that has not only been surprising, but deeply taxing.
She won her previous three matches in three sets, including a 9-7 third set in her second-round win over Ivana Jorovic. Riske has now beaten the No. 1, No. 13 and No. 22 seeds at this tournament.
The 11th-seeded Williams, a seven-time Wimbledon singles champion, will be her next task on Tuesday. Before the tournament, there was plenty of talk about how Williams, 37, had found herself in the toughest slice of the women’s singles draw. She has not been in peak form since returning to tour in March 2018 after the birth of her daughter. This season, she struggled with a knee injury for months and was upset in the third round of the French Open in June.
How would she survive the so-called Quarter of Death, which featured not just Barty, with her top ranking and recent French Open title, but three former No. 1s and Wimbledon champions: Garbiñe Muguruza, Maria Sharapova and Angelique Kerber?
By the end of play on Monday, all of the aforementioned challengers had fallen.
In other sections of the draw, there was continuing carnage. Pliskova fell to her Czech countrywoman Karolina Muchova in a 4-6, 7-5, 13-11 marathon. Muchova, 22, who like Riske reached her first Grand Slam quarterfinal, will play eighth-seeded Elina Svitolina on Tuesday.
Kvitova, a two-time Wimbledon champion, also bowed out, losing to Britain’s Johanna Konta, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4. Konta will next face Barbora Strycova, a top doubles player ranked 54th in singles.
Tuesday’s other quarterfinal match will pit seventh-seeded Simona Halep, the highest remaining seed at No. 7, against Zhang Shuai, a 30-year-old Chinese player who had not gotten past the first round at Wimbledon until this year.
In that crowd, it’s no wonder that Williams, once again, is arguably the tournament favorite.
But first, she must get past Riske, who showed in her post-match news conference that she has no plans to back down.
“Today was a great preparation for me going into the Serena match,” Riske said. “I’m ready for a war.”
Source : NYtimes
