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Serena Williams Falls to Karolina Pliskova With Late Collapse
MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams was one point from the Australian Open semifinals when she lost her footing and the match slipped away.
Williams, who was seeking a record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title, lost the final six games to fall, 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, to Karolina Pliskova on Wednesday, relinquishing her lead after rolling her left ankle when the match was within her reach.
“I was almost in the locker room, but now I’m standing here as a winner,” Pliskova said in her on-court interview after the match. “So it’s a really good feeling.”
Williams, known more for improbable comebacks than collapses, had not lost a Grand Slam match after holding a match point since the 2010 French Open.
Pliskova, the No. 7 seed, will face the fourth-seeded Naomi Osaka in the semifinals on Thursday. The other semifinal pits the eighth-seeded Petra Kvitova against the unseeded American Danielle Collins.
This was Williams’s fourth major tournament since resuming her career in 2018 after the birth of her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in September 2017. Williams withdrew before the fourth round of last year’s French Open because of an injury and lost in two other Grand Slam finals — to Anqelique Kerber at Wimbledon and to Osaka at the United States Open in a match remembered primarily for Williams’s confrontation with the chair umpire, which cost her a game penalty.
Williams, who dispatched the top-seeded Simona Halep in a hard-fought, fourth-round match, has not defeated two top-10 players at the same event since returning from her pregnancy. She has spoken candidly about her struggles to return to peak physical condition after giving birth, and she arrived here looking fitter than she had since before her pregnancy.
Williams, 37, has not reached for excuses, even when she has struggled in ways she had not before leaving the tour to become a mother.
“From Day 1, I expect to go out and, quite frankly, to win,” Williams said. “That hasn’t happened. But I do like my attitude. I like that I don’t want to go out here and say, ‘I expect to lose because I had a year off, I’ve been playing for 10 months, I’m not supposed to win.’ I don’t have that attitude.”
While Williams’s mind-set has been positive, on Wednesday her body betrayed her and the match suddenly pivoted in Pliskova’s favor.
Her match turned in an instant. With a commanding 5-1 lead in the third set, the 16th-seeded Williams held a match point on her serve, at 40-30. But after she was called for a foot fault on her first serve, Williams appeared to sustain an injury in the rally that began off her second serve, rolling her left ankle as she tried to change directions to reach a shot from Pliskova.
Williams lost the point, and then the next two points. She did not call a medical timeout on the ensuing changeover, but she retied her shoelaces, making them tighter.
“I really hate calling the trainer out, to be honest,” she said. “And at that point I didn’t feel like I needed it or I didn’t feel like it would be a big deal. So I just kept going.”
But the tighter shoes did not keep her in the match. Pliskova won the next two games, pulling to 4-5, suddenly back on serve. Williams earned three more match points in the 10th game, but Pliskova saved them all.
“I thought, ‘All right, here we go, you’re going to win one of these,’” Williams said. “That clearly didn’t happen, but I was just trying at that point.”
Pliskova held on to make it 5-5 with a backhand cross-court winner, punctuated with a loud and long scream.
“Then, suddenly, I got a chance too,” Pliskova said of her improbable victory after facing four match points. “That’s how it is in tennis. You need luck, of course, because this is — I think — not happening often. Maybe once in life. But I went for it.”
Williams, who like all right-handers lands on her left foot when she serves, lost all 10 remaining points on her serve after the injury. While she said she would not know how bad her ankle injury was until a day later, she played down the effect of the injury on the outcome of the match, repeatedly giving Pliskova credit for playing “lights out” tennis as she surged back.
“I think she just played well on my serve after that point,” Williams said. “I think she just kind of started playing really, really good. I don’t think it had anything to do with my ankle, per se. I just think she was just nailing and hitting shots. Obviously I made some mistakes, but she played really well after that.”
Pliskova said she thought something might have happened to Williams, but that she remained focused on her own side of the court.
“Whatever is happening on the other side, I just try to block it,” Pliskova said. “Either it’s positive or negative, whatever is there, it’s just not my business. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. I know once I’m starting to think about that, it’s bad.”
Pliskova won the next two games to complete the improbable comeback, winning after Williams hit a forehand into the net for an unforced error on her third match point.
Pliskova, a former No. 1, had knocked Williams out of a Grand Slam event before, beating her in straight sets in the 2016 United States Open semifinals. She had looked on track for a similarly efficient victory when she broke Williams for a 3-2 lead in the second set.
But Williams roared back, breaking Pliskova at love in the next game, beginning a stretch of winning 9 of 11 games and taking complete command of the match before her late collapse.
Pliskova, whose appearance in the 2016 United States Open final was her only previous major title match, has won two of her previous three matches against Osaka. She most recently beat her 6-4, 6-4 in the final of the WTA tournament in Tokyo in September.
Osaka, 21, will be seeking a second straight Grand Slam title. She reached the semifinals with a 6-4, 6-1 victory over the sixth-seeded Elina Svitolina.
Osaka, who had never reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam before her triumph in New York last fall, said she was keeping this accomplishment in perspective.
“To be here is something that a lot of people want, and I know that a few months ago I would have given anything to be in the semifinals of a slam,” Osaka said. “But it’s this weird feeling of: You want to do the next big thing. And especially now that I won a Grand Slam, and I feel like I want to win another one, and I’m so close and I just want to keep going.”
Osaka and Kvitova could each claim the No. 1 ranking for the first time if they win the tournament on Saturday. After pulling herself from the brink of defeat, Pliskova also has a chance to return to the No. 1 ranking with a victory, even if she had begun to count herself out of the tournament when she was one point from defeat.
“My mind was in the locker room,” Pliskova said. “I was still here.”
For Williams, who has the trophy as her goal every time she arrives at a Grand Slam event, her quest to match Margaret Court’s 24 singles Grand Slam titles will resume at the French Open in May.
”I mean, the big picture for me is always winning,” Williams said. “I’m not going to sit here and lie about that. It hasn’t happened yet, but I feel like it’s going to happen. Just keep taking it one match at a time, just keep soldiering on, I guess.”
Karen Crouse contributed reporting.
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