Belinda Bencic had just lost the second set after being up 5-3 and having a match point. Over the course of the last four games, she had begun to miss shots she normally doesn’t miss, and she had watched as her opponent, Eugenie Bouchard, had begun to make shots she hasn’t made all year. Bencic had bounced her racquet and rolled her eyes and pleaded with her father as the Toronto crowd stood and cheered for her Canadian opponent.
Now Bencic sat on the sideline between sets and nodded her head in rhythm to the music coming through the loudspeakers. She took a look at what was happening on the big screen at the end of the court and smiled. She didn’t appear to be someone who had just blown a match point; the last 15 minutes seemed to have been forgotten completely. Was this just the normal reaction, and mood swing, of an 18-year-old to a loud dance song? Possibly. But it also looked like she just wasn’t all that worried about losing this match.
That was still true two games later, when Bencic was down 0-1 and 0-30 on her serve. That’s when, finally, she seemed to decide that things had gone far enough. On the next point, she reared back and hit one of her biggest serves of the night, and followed it with an emphatic swing volley winner. The spell was broken. Bencic would lose just one more game, and silence the audience, in recording a 6-0, 5-7, 6-2 win. By the end, the result never seemed to have been in doubt.
“It was a really big fight,” Bencic said afterward. “It’s not like I really choked or something. She played really well in that moment.”