Finding Higher Ground

After two weeks of rain and a week of floods, Roland Garros finally stumbled onto high ground on Friday. The four favored players in the singles semifinals did what they were supposed to do—turn in winning, and mostly outstanding, performances—to set up a strong pair of finals for the weekend. I won’t go so far as to call them “dream finals,” but they’re the best the tournament could get. Here’s a quick look back at how each of the four winners made it there. They played some good tennis to do it.

The last time I wrote about Muguruza, on Wednesday, I said that you can generally tell from the way she starts a match how she’s going to finish it. Some days, she finds a way to win points and dig herself of out tricky situations; other days, she finds a way to lose points she should win.

With that in mind, it didn’t take long to figure out who was going to end up the winner of this semifinal. Muguruza, standing tall at the baseline and playing downhill, was up 3-0 in a matter of minutes. Before the match, Stosur’s coach, David Taylor—this was their last tournament together—said that the key to playing the 6’0 Muguruza, as it is against all tall players, is to move her.

“She’s super strong when she’s set and has time,” Taylor said.

So she was against his player, and so she may be against Serena Williams in the final. In a topsy-turvy year for the WTA, a topsy-turvy Slam champion like Muguruza makes sense.

As for the rest of us, Muguruza's performance in Paris offers a lesson: As she has said more than once, despite her disappointing results through the first three months of 2016, she doesn’t think she got off to a “slow start” to the season. She just worked and practiced and patiently stuck to the plan, and now she’s back where she always knew she belonged, in a major final. That’s a winner’s mentality.

Lots of wins means lots of matches, and that means lots of wear and tear on the body. It’s no accident that the WTA’s two best players over the last month had to hobble into the French Open semis on Friday. Bertens, who was on a 12-match win streak, had a strained calf, while Serena revealed afterward that she’s had an adductor injury. Whatever their ailments, this match played out much like their early-rounder at the U.S. Open last year.

Again, the first set went to a tiebreaker. Again, Bertens had chances. And again, Bertens controlled the rallies, right up until the moment when she could have won the set. Twice the Dutchwoman, who served for the set at 5-4, was one point away; twice she misfired on a shot she has been making all month. It seemed, as she said later, that just playing well was enough for her against Serena.

“I’m really happy with today,” a smiling Bertens said afterward. “Played a really good match, played really aggressive tennis.”

You can understand why the 58th-ranked Bertens would be satisfied: By reaching the French Open semis, she went further at a major than she ever thought she would. But she was also closer than she let herself believe to taking it one step further. Instead of Bertens going for her first major title, Serena will go for her 22nd.

There has been a lot of talk over the years about Djokovic’s relationship to tennis audiences. It hasn’t always been as warm as he would have hoped. On Friday, though, we got to see the world No. 1 perform in front of a raucous and largely pro-Nole crowd in Court Suzanne-Lenglen. How did they get there? Seeing how empty that arena had been the previous day, due to the floods in Paris, the tournament’s organizers allowed grounds-pass holders to fill the seats. The arrivistes brought a new, more antic energy to the court—”They’re a noisy lot,” Richard Evans said in the commentary booth—and Djokovic responded. He broke Thiem out of the gate, and after one winning point in the first set, he raised his fist to the fans in salute. Djokovic hasn’t shown that kind of positive energy, that early in a match, in ... I don’t know how long.

It never wore off. Thiem came with both guns blazing, but he quickly discovered that he was shooting blanks. Djokovic seemed to relish the chance to slide and defend from far back in the court, grind his opponent down and eventually turn the tables. The rallies were long, and Thiem was on the losing side of all of them. By the second set, Djokovic was loose and firing his shots to the corners without fear. Roger Federer has often talked about how little chance an opponent has when Djokovic is in a caution-to-the-wind mode. Thiem understood what that felt like on Friday.

“He was just too strong,” Thiem said. “That’s all I can say.”

“Best performance of the tournament,” Djokovic said, assessing himself. “As I was hoping after the long fourth round, that I’m going to start playing better as the tournament progresses, and that’s what’s happening now.”

Did Djokovic have that “noisy lot” of fans in Lenglen to thank? He did his post-match interview in French, so I can’t say for sure. But he hasn’t smiled like that in a while.

While Djokovic put on his best performance of the tournament, Murray might have put on the best performance of his career. He beat the defending champion on a day when Wawrinka was playing solid, motivated tennis, and when he had the entirety of Chatrier behind him. That’s not easy, but Murray pulled it off with hardly a hiccup to become the first British man since 1937 to reach the French Open final.

“I played one of my best matches here today,” an emotional, nearly trembling Murray told the crowd afterward. “I’m just really proud. I never expected to reach the final here.”

Murray has been improving on clay for a little more than a year now, and on Friday everything came together. He gathered in Wawrinka’s biggest baseline blows and sent them back into the corners with interest. For Murray, offense blended seamlessly with defense: He hit outright drop-shot winners from behind the baseline and flipped running topspin lob winners over Wawrinka’s head. And it was Murray's backhand down the line, rather than Wawrinka’s, that was the game-changing weapon. Murray, who was 19 of 23 at the net and was broken just once, played with his usual variety and consistency, but there was something extra in his shots on Friday; a little more pace, a little more angle, a little assurance. By the third set, I had stopped expecting him to miss anything.

Murray had lost his last three to Wawrinka in straight sets, and you could see from the start that he really wanted this one. He played with total concentration and an unstoppable sense of purpose, and even after his one slip-up, at the end of the third set, he bounced back immediately to break serve.

Or, as Wawrinka—the man who played the match of his career on the same court last year—put it: “When you play someone at such a level, what can you do?”

He would know. You lose.