With 2017 nearing its close, it's time to decide what was the year's best match. Steve Tignor will conclude his top 10 contest countdown over the next two weeks—but which was your favorite? We want to know, so vote for your favorite match in our poll.
Tennis Channel will air the Top 3 matches with the most votes on December 31st, in full.
Jelena Ostapenko d. Simona Halep 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, French Open, final
Sometimes it starts with the most innocuous mistakes, ones that are made when the match seems all but over and the fans are hardly paying attention anymore.
Roughly an hour into the French Open final, Simona Halep led Jelena Ostapenko 6-4, 3-0, and had break points to make it 4-0. With defense, depth and consistency, Halep had been patiently grinding away and judiciously picking her spots to attack. At the same time, the Latvian’s low-margin, go-for-broke game appeared, finally, to have broken down.
By 0-3 in the second set, Ostapenko was shrugging in resignation after each mistake. Nobody would have blamed the 20-year-old for not winning her first major final. One more miss and the title looked sure to be Halep’s.
Except that it was Halep who missed. Nothing terrible, really; no blatant gags or easy shots horrifically botched. On one break point, Halep flipped a running forehand wide. On another, she was late on a down-the-line backhand, and that too landed wide. But with those two shots this final, and French Open history, had changed. Ostapenko held for 1-3 with a forehand winner. Now that she was on the board, she could think about working her way back into the match.
From that point on a pattern emerged: Ostapenko, going for winners on the first chance she had—and sometimes when she had no chance at all—would miss just often enough to give Halep a lead in a game or a set. But whenever she absolutely had to have a point, Ostapenko found a way to connect. She finished with 54 winners and 54 errors, but every winner seemed to come exactly when she needed one. Her shot selection was like The Simpsons’ description of alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Ostapenko started by saving those break points at 0-3 in the second set. At 2-3, she saved two more, one with a backhand winner that skidded off the sideline, and another with a strong first serve down the T that caught Halep off guard. At 3-3, Ostapenko gave away two break points, then broke through on the third with a swing volley winner. And serving for the set, in a match that featured 14 service breaks, she suddenly held for the set with, you guessed it, three winners.
The key, according to Ostapenko, was to ignore the mistakes and have faith that an attacking mindset was the surest way to make her game come around. And why wouldn’t she have that faith? Over those two weeks in Paris, the unseeded, 47th-ranked Ostapenko had endured countless ups and downs on her magical ride to the final. Four of her six wins had come in three sets; why couldn’t it happen a fifth time?
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