Who is Ajla Tomljanović?
Basic facts:
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She was born in Croatia but has switched her nationality to Australia.
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Her top career singles ranking is 38th, set in February of this year. She’s currently 46th.
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She has reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon two straight years.
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Her favorite city to visit is … Charlotte, N.C., maybe not the world’s biggest tourist destination but a place where she has some family.
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She made her WTA main draw event in 2009 and cracked the year-end top 100 in 2013.
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Her father played handball. (For American readers who don’t follow the Olympics, we mean the kind with nets, not walls.)
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Her best tennis memory was her first time on the court with Chris Evert, so it’s a little unfortunate that Evert is absent from the broadcast booth tonight. Mary Jo Hernandez is up there with John McEnroe and Chris Fowler.
Pre-match pomp and circumstance is ending. Here we go …
Meanwhile, in men’s tennis …
Top seed Daniil Medvedev once again has the dubious honor of trying to follow Serena at Arthur Ashe Stadium, facing Yibing Wu and reminding me of when I saw Cheap Trick in top form opening for an indifferent Robert Plant.
But like the women’s draw with Serena, the men’s draw’s highlight is the progression of fellow veteran Rafael Nadal, who advanced today despite bashing himself in the nose.
It’s as if women’s tennis was taking place in some alternate timeline, and Serena followed Spock through a time wormhole or whatever it was that made it possible for Leonard Nimoy to appear in the Star Trek reboot.
None of these players have ever played Serena.
Not Danka Kovinic, Serena’s first-round opponent here. Not Kontaveit. Not Tomljanović, tonight’s opponent.
Not Samsonova or Krunic (first names will be at the end of this post), her prospective fourth-round opponents.
Not her prospective quarterfinal opponents, fifth seed Ons Jabeur and 18th seed Veronika Kudermetova, who have already won their third-round matches.
Not even top seed Iga Świątek, a two-time French Open champion who’s less accomplished on hardcourts.
If these players were up-and-coming prodigies with youthful swaggers that make them impervious to the Serena mystique, maybe they’d have more of a chance. Kontaveit gained confidence for a while, fighting back in the first set to force a tiebreaker and then rolling past Serena in the second set, but it always seemed as if Serena was just catching her breath before unleashing the fury in the third.
But with the exception of the 21-year-old Świątek, these are veteran players who know they’re supposed to be intimidated, and they are, even if Tomljanović has come up with a novel way of blocking out the crowd that already annoyed her when she was playing several courts away.
(This is a home-court advantage of a type rarely, if ever, seen in tennis. On occasion, a handful of people have cheered opponents’ service errors, but for the most part it has been an appreciative crowd – and Serena herself once shut down fans who grumbled about a line call, an unusual complaint in a tournament whose line calls are judged electronically.)
The most interesting bracket right now would determine a potential semifinal opponent for Serena. Coco Gauff defeated Madison Keys in a matchup of younger US players inspired by the Williams sisters. In Louis Armstrong Stadium tonight, 2019 US Open champion Bianca Andreescu faces a solid player in Caroline Garcia.
Serena still has to win five matches to match Margaret Court’s record of 23 Grand Slam victories, a mark set in an era in which the field of competition was nowhere near as vast as it is today. Streaks end, and Serena’s might come to a close before she has a chance to play that dream final. But there’s no one in this field who makes you think, “Yes, THAT is the person who will beat Serena.” Not after seeing Williams play Wednesday as a supposed underdog who thoroughly outclassed the world’s No. 2 player.
(Those…
Read More: Serena Williams v Ajla Tomljanović: US Open tennis 2022 – live! | Serena Williams