The notion that laughter sometimes hides the pain could not have been more present during the post-match press conference of No. 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka late Thursday night. As per usual, Sabalenka punctuated a number of her answers from the media with a few chortles and self-deprecatory jokes.
She did her best to hide the pain of coming up just short at another major.
To be fair, Sabalenka has had a remarkable season. Her 43 match wins is tops on the WTA Tour, and she has two titles to her credit, including a WTA 1000 event in Madrid, as well as another finals appearance in Stuttgart. Of those 43 match wins in 2021, a startling 15 have come in the Grand Slams, where she made at least the third round in all four majors.
None of those 15 Grand Slam wins, however, came beyond the quarterfinal round, and her loss to 19-year-old Leylah Fernandez—with a championship berth at the US Open at stake—pairs with her semifinal loss at Wimbledon two months ago, where she won the first set before falling to Karolina Pliskova.
The pain, surely from the loss to Fernandez and almost certainly from the deafening noise inside Ashe, is sinking in.
“Yeah, my head right now is about to... I don't know what's going to happen,” Sabalenka said during the press conference.
Who knows what will happen in the next few years in terms of her Grand Slam prospects and whether she can shake the “best player to never win a major” tag that could follow her around in every tournament she plays until 2022. The game she plays is more than enough to win that elusive major, and her punishing groundstrokes from both wings were on display when she powered to a 4-1 lead over Fernandez to begin the match, losing just two points in her first three service games.
Then the set got tight, and so did Sabalenka. She was forced into a tiebreak, and at 3-4 in the breaker Sabalenka made a mess of a topspin lob that put her down a minibreak and eventually cost her the set. Even during her second-set win, Sabalenka smashed her racquet in disgust during a changeover after dropping a service game. Serving to stay in the match at 4-5 in the deciding set, Sabalenka made three unforced errors to start the disastrous game, including throwing in back-to-back double faults. The poise possessed by future champions in helping themselves keep calm in the biggest moments eluded the Belarusian...and belonged to the 19-year-old Canadian who, along with 18-year-old Emma Raducanu and her win in the second semifinal later in the evening, just cut Sabalenka in the line of women waiting to win Grand Slam No. 1.
“This is what we call pressure. That's why I'm a little bit disappointed about this match because, as I said, I had a lot of opportunities and I didn't use it,” Sabalenka said. “Well, this is life. If you're not using your opportunities, someone else will use it. This is what happened today.”
Tennis life, and life in general, can be pretty painful, for sure.
Despite the obvious disappointment in New York, there is Grand Slam success that Sabalenka can look back on to use as fuel for next season’s swing through the majors, as she and Elise Mertens won the 2021 Australian Open women’s doubles title. Two years prior, the pair won the doubles tournament here in Flushing Meadows, Sabalenka’s first taste of raising a trophy in a major.
All of those peaks and valleys are invaluable lessons on the way to being a champion, though the lesson after Thursday night will come after one of her most gut-wrenching defeats of her young career. When asked specifically what lesson she can draw from her semifinal match, Sabalenka paused for a good five seconds, smirked, and then said, “I’ll still need some time to think about this.”
As they say, time heals all wounds.
