NEW YORK—On Thursday, with temperatures soaring into the 90s and players dropping like flies (12 men retired in the first two rounds, which is the highest total for a Slam in the Open era), Johanna Konta won the longest women’s match at the U.S. Open since the introduction of the tiebreak in 1970. After three hours and 23 minutes, the 97th-ranked Brit knocked out No. 9 seed and Wimbledon runner-up Garbine Muguruza, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (4), 6-2.
“I had a couple glances on the clock. I'm like, ‘Oh, okay. We have been here for a while,’” Konta says. “It's difficult with sweating buckets … after changing clothes, they literally weighed like a lot. But we deal with it as best we can; it was the same for her and the same for a lot of players playing out there at this time.”
The 24-year-old kept her composure amidst the oppressive conditions from first ball to last. After dropping the second set in a tiebreak—and a tough line call threw the momentum in Muguruza’s favor—Konta was put to a physical and mental test.
“To finish off, it was more like I had no energy to do anything else,” Konta says. “But, if I'm not going to stay calm mentally, if I'm not going to stay focused, then I'm not going to give myself the best chance of beating some of the best players in the world.”
With four match wins already under her belt in Flushing Meadows, the qualifier had plenty of recent experience to draw upon. But Muguruza was a massive step up in class from Reka-Luca Jani, Naomi Osaka, Tamira Paszek, and her first-round opponent Louisa Chirico. Yet Konta has experience there, too: She’d already beaten Muguruza earlier this season, in Eastbourne (6-4, 4-6, 6-3).
Konta put all of that experience and focus to good use in the third set, which lasted a scant 56 minutes—the first lasted 80, the second 67—to record her third-ever main-draw win at a major. But it was also her 15th in a row, overall: Before arriving in New York, the Australian-turned-Brit won two Challenger events in Canada.
