The Overnight: Marin Cilic finds a middle gear in win over Kyle Edmund

Cilic's middle gear

For the majority of his 12-year career, Marin Cilic has played in what you might call a low gear. Despite being a rangy and potentially powerful 6’6”, he has been content to kick his serve in and direct his shots from one corner to another without incurring much risk.

Then, suddenly, during the second week of the 2014 US Open, Cilic switched into a high gear. A very high gear. He rained down aces and punished anything remotely weak from his opponents. He dismantled Tomas Berdych, Roger Federer, and Kei Nishikori in succession, all in straight sets, for the title.

It took him nearly three years, but Cilic found that high gear again in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, when he hit 83 winners to beat Rafael Nadal over five sets. The question was, could he keep it up for the rest of the week, the way he did at Flushing Meadows? Would he need to churn out 83-winner performances every night to win the title?

Match Point:

The answer, it turns out, was no, Cilic wouldn’t have to fly quite so high on a nightly basis. On Thursday night, he beat Kyle Edmund 6-2, 7-6 (4), 6-2 in the semifinals with 32 winners. He faced just two break points, and was never broken. Cilic didn’t need to swing for the fences. He just needed to use his serve to stretch Edmund on the return, and use his forehand to force him to move from side to side along the baseline. By the time Cilic was cruising through the third set, he had found a comfortable middle gear.

“I think I played a great tournament so far with my level of tennis,” Cilic said. “I think I improved it compared to end of the last year. I’m playing much, much more aggressive. I’m feeling that I am, for most of the shots, hitting them really, really good...Feeling really excited about the final, too.”

Can a middle gear bring Cilic the title? That may depend on who he has to play.

The Furious 50

Through its first 24 games and 90 minutes, the semifinal between Simona Halep and Angelique Kerber had been about as competitive and entertaining as a paying customer could expect. Kerber had started slowly, before warming to the task in the second set, but Halep has reasserted her authority and seemed to have the match in hand when she served for it at 5-3 in the third. That’s when things got good.

It began with a 26-shot, full-tilt, full-roar, corner-to-corner rally, which Kerber ended with a crosscourt backhand hit at an impossibly acute angle. When the ball went for a winner, Kerber dropped to her knees; it’s unclear if she could have swung the racquet one more time. In reality, though, this match was only getting started. The next 50 minutes would bring us the most intense passage of play of the tournament so far. For condensed excitement, those 50 minutes may be hard to top all year.

Halep and Kerber would run each other from sideline to sideline. They would punch and counterpunch. They grunt in aggression and desperation. They would hold and save match points. They would stare at their player boxes in disbelief and yell at their coaches in frustration. But they would also fend off that frustration, which has overwhelmed each of them in the past. Most of all, they would rise to each other’s level.

And then, from 7-7, Halep would rise a little higher. After squandering a 5-3 lead and two match points, she had gestured angrily toward her coach, Darren Cahill, until he finally had to tell her to just get on with it. At that point, the match had become a judgement on Halep; on whether, after losing a lead in the French Open final last year, she could avoid losing another one here. Halep says she’s determined to be more “courageous” in these situations this year. This time, rather than let her frustration distract her, she channeled it into a winningly aggressive game. From the first swing of a rally to the last, Halep pounded the ball with a controlled fury and put Kerber on her heels. Kerber held off the Halep storm for as long as she could, and saved one more match point at 7-8, but she couldn’t save a second.

“I was fighting until the last point,” Halep said.

“I was fighting until the last point,” Kerber said.

We’ll be lucky to see a better fight in 2018.

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