WTA Match of the Year, No. 5: Madison Keys topples Iga Swiatek in dramatic Australian Open semifinal

This week, Steve Tignor will reveal his WTA Matches of the Year, and the TENNIS.com editors will reveal our WTA Players of the Year. Check out our ATP Matches of the Year and ATP Players of the Year.

Can a person feel multiples senses of déjà vu, from multiple experiences in the past, all at one time? If so, Madison Keys may have seen her life flashing before her eyes near the end of her Australian Open semifinal with Iga Swiatek back in January.

To say the 29-year-old had been there before would be something of an understatement. In 2015, she made the semifinals in Melbourne as a 19-year-old, and she did it again in 2022. She’d reached the semis at majors four other times—once at Roland Garros, three times at the US Open—but had won just one of those matches. The most recent of her defeats, to Aryna Sabalenka in New York in 2023, was a genuine home-Slam heartbreaker. Keys won the first set 6-0 and served for the match, only to lose in a final-set tiebreaker.

Was something similar about to happen against Swiatek? This time Keys rolled through the second set 6-1. In the third, she had two break points to go up 5-3, and led 15-30 on Swiatek’s serve at 4-5. Both times she tightened up and missed, and the match went to a deciding 10-point tiebreaker. At 7-7 in the breaker, Keys had a good look at a forehand pass, but could only watch helplessly as Swiatek reflexed a volley back for a winner. Two more points and the American would fall at the finish line once again.

🖥️📲 Watch some of the best matches of 2025 on the Tennis Channel App!

Read More: Madison Keys saves match point, edges Iga Swiatek to reach Australian Open final

This time, though, while Keys had squandered some chances, she had also fought back from the brink. At 4-4 in the third, she went down 0-40 on her serve before holding. At 5-6, she saved a match point with a strong return. And after being down by two points through much of the tiebreaker—2-4, 3-5, 4-6, 5-7—she had leveled at 7-7.

Swiatek was seeded 18 spots ahead of Keys, and has a 4-1 against her. But every time it looked as if Keys would lose control of her shots and blast herself out of the match, she responded by dialing her swings back in and knocking off another winner.

Through the latter stages, Keys said, semi-jokingly, that she “blacked out and was just running around.” She didn’t even remember that Swiatek reached match point.

“I kind of kept telling myself, ‘Just try to get the next point,’” Keys said. “I think it helped me because I was just able to kind of solely focus on that. Win it or lose it, move on to the next point.”

By the time they reached 7-8, there weren’t many points left. Getting to the final was a now or never proposition for both women, neither of whom had made it that far on this court before. It was the lower-seeded Keys who took matters into her own hands. She hit an ace out wide for 8-8, then a service winner for 9-8. At match point, she played a return down the middle, and watched as Swiatek overhit a forehand long.

“It was so high level,” Keys said. “I was just trying to stay in it. The third set was just a battle. We were both battling some nerves, just pushing each other. Who can get that final point, and who can be a little bit better than the other one.”

How did Keys get there first? How does a player put the past behind her and write a new ending at 29, after a dozen years on tour?

During the off-season, she said, she decided to be open to change.

“I think that the big focus for me was really just kind of buying into ‘I'll try anything, I’ll do anything, I’ll be open,’” Keys said.

To that end, she switched racquets, changed her service motion, and vowed that, when the important moments came, she wouldn’t flinch. The attitude, she said, “was a little bit more freeing.”

Keys made those changes with her coach and husband, Bjorn Fratangelo. This year was the first at the Australian Open where coaches were placed in the corners of the court. Fratangelo’s presence there seemed to give Keys a boost, and keep the game plan front and center in her mind.

Two days later, all of those elements were in place again, as Keys followed up her win over the world No. 2 with another nail-biter over the world No. 1, Aryna Sabalenka. She was nearly 30, but she was a brand-new, and very popular, Grand Slam champ.