Serena Williams came close to a sensational comeback win on her Wimbledon return before narrowly losing an epic three-setter to Maya Joint.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, the American great waved what many thought would be a final goodbye to Centre Court after a first-round loss to France’s Harmony Tan.<\/p>\n
But on Tuesday, the 44-year-old received an electric reception as she stepped back onto the pristine grass courts on which she won seven singles and six women’s doubles titles.<\/p>\n
And, 1,462 days after her last point at the All England Club, Williams demonstrated her never-give-up mentality to save a match point and force a deciding set against a player 24 years her junior.<\/p>\n
Despite the crowd’s best attempts to help Williams open the latest chapter of her tennis career with victory, Australia’s Joint held firm to claim a 6-3 6-7 (6-8) 6-3 win.<\/p>\n
Williams congratulated Joint at the net before lapping up the ovation that came her way as she made her exit.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t get much sleep last night, I was up until 2am just thinking about it,” Joint said in her on-court interview.<\/p>\n
“Walking out, I forgot the warm-up, my legs weren’t moving.<\/p>\n
“I really don’t know what to say right now. I don’t know what just happened.”<\/p>\n
Williams did not carry out a mandatory post-match news conference, releasing a statement instead.<\/p>\n
“It was really great to be back at Wimbledon. I never expected to be here. The atmosphere was amazing. Walking out was amazing,” it read.<\/p>\n
“I definitely relished it and missed it and enjoyed the moment more than anything.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Serena Williams came close to a sensational comeback win on her Wimbledon return before narrowly losing an epic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-526543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}