Roland Garros women's final preview: Mirra Andreeva has surprise showdown with qualifier Maja Chwalinska

At the start of this tournament, I said there were four “core contenders.” They also happened to be the Top 4 women in the world: Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Iga Swiatek, and Coco Gauff. None of them, as you can see, made the final. None of them made the semifinals.

Mirra Andreeva, in my formulation, was in the next ring of players. She was a dark horse, a wild card, a player who, at 19, clearly had the game to win it all, but had yet to put everything together at a Slam. Equal parts talented and temperamental, she might find a groove, or she might implode. Obviously she has done the former, at a level we haven’t seen from her before.

Maja Chwalinska, a qualifier ranked 114th, wasn’t on my radar at all. I knew her mainly as the Polish teammate who plopped a bag of ice on Iga Swiatek’s head during a particularly heated United Cup match. I started to take note of Chwalinska when she beat two quality opponents, Zheng Quinwen and Elise Mertens, by identical 6-4, 6-0 scores. How was someone just 5-foot-5, with a loopy, underpowered serve and groundstrokes, bageling a pair of players who have been in the Top 20?

Chwalinska has been wondering the same thing herself.

“It’s definitely a big surprise for me, and I didn’t expect it,” the 24-year-old said when she won her seventh match in Paris to reach the quarterfinals.

What was she thinking when closed out her semifinal win over Diana Shnaider on Thursday?

“I honestly don't know what was going on in my head,” she said. “I was just in such a shock.”

Now Chwalinska and Andreeva will face off for an unexpected title. Neither has played a major final before, and this will be their first meeting. Which means we really don’t have much of an idea what’s going to happen.

How will they react to the thick atmosphere of tension in Chatrier, which will be unlike anything they’ve experienced? How will their games match up?

“It’s going to be very entertaining, very interesting, as well, because obviously I have never played against her,” Andreeva says. “It’s going to be a new match for both of us.”

Andreeva and Chwalinska have their similarities. Both are baseliners, both have two-handed backhands, and both use topspin as a weapon. But  their differences are more striking.

Since the fourth round, Andreeva has used a powerful serve and tremendous extension through her ground strokes to create a relentless, but never reckless, attack. She combines pace, depth, spin, and net clearance to build a kind of fortress for herself at the baseline. Watching the 5-foot-9 Russian pummel away without taking any big risks, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could break her game down. Nobody has come close so far. In her last two matches, she steamrolled two in-form opponents, Sorana Cirstea and Marta Kostyuk.

Chwalinska, by contrast, uses a more varied repertoire to disrupt the other player’s rhythm and maneuver them out of position. She’ll send one ball up high, and force her opponent to hit it from above her shoulder. Then she’ll chop through the next one with side-spinning slice. She might throw in a backhand drop shot without ever taking her second arm off the racquet. And when her opponent approaches the net, Chawlinska has a deadly passing shot. Rather than try to blast the ball past her opponents, she creates openings.

“I don’t have the physicality\] to play strong, so I need to develop a different kind of weapons for myself,” Chwalinska told [wtatennis.com last week. “I definitely played differently, and I think it helps me a lot against these players.”

I’d say there are two primary questions in this match:

First, will either player be especially nerve-ridden? It has been a big factor in Roland Garros finals before. Chwalinska, who can’t power her way past her nerves, might seem like the more likely candidate. But she has been a picture of calm on the court this week, and says she’s happy living in her “bubble” right now.

Second, how much can Chwalinska disrupt Andreeva, and get her out of the fearsome groove she’s in right now? Will her loops and chops and drops throw the Russian off and leave her frustrated? Or will Andreeva’s heavy ground strokes be too much for the smaller Pole to handle, and keep her in retrieval mode?

Like Andreeva said, it will be “interesting” and hopefully “entertaining” to find out. I’ll take the taller, stronger, higher-ranked player to win the first of many majors. And I’ll hope her opponent makes it close. Winner: Andreeva