—Then Venus relented. If you’ve watched her over the years, you know how quickly she can go from dominating to struggling—it just takes one bad game to turn a good run around. In this match, that game came at 3-1 in the second set. At 30-30, Pliskova stayed patient, and Venus finally shanked a forehand. Pliskova won the second set.
—In the third, it was Venus’ turn to come back from 1-3 down. As the third set progressed and the score slowly tightened, the tension in the arena became, as the cliché goes, unbearable—the humid New York air really was thick with it.
Venus and Pliskova, whose low-margin missiles elicited gasps from the audience, gave us a match worthy of the moment—this was tennis as a high-wire act. That was especially true of Pliskova, whose perfect timing generates a stunning amount of pace with seemingly little effort. Like her countryman Tomas Berdych when he connects on a ball, Pliskova’s shots appear to pick up speed after they cross the net.
At 4-4, the two women staged an epic game that Williams finally won. But when Venus reached match point at 5-4, Pliskova fearlessly sent a backhand into one corner and a swing volley into the other for a winner. At 5-5, Pliskova benefited from a net-cord winner on a passing shot. At 5-6, it was Venus’ turn to save three match points and send the match to a fitting final-set breaker.
—That was great news for the crowd, but Venus fans had to be worried; she can struggle in tiebreakers, and she did here. After two hours and 20 minutes of high-wire tennis, Venus finally fell off the tightrope. With everything on the line, she couldn’t find the court, and Pliskova could.
“That was the biggest stage that I’ve played,” said the always-cool Pliskova, who never let the Open’s fans see her sweat. “I wanted to beat her, not the crowd. [It’s] impossible to beat 23,000 people.”
Impossible? Not on this day.