Linda Noskova avoided the fate of her compatriot Jana Novotna, who famously wept on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent, as she survived a thrilling comeback.<\/p>\n
But the five straight games that Noskova lost in set two of this memorable final did not sink her challenge in the way that a similar five-game run had for Novotna against Steffi Graf in 1993.<\/p>\n
Instead, Noskova showed enormous strength of character to regroup from wasting five match points in that second set, and came through in the decider instead. The result \u2013 a 6-2, 5-7, 6-3 victory for Noskova \u2013 came up in two hours and 27 minutes and did much to erase the memory of last year\u2019s 6-0, 6-0 blowout in this equivalent match.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t yet mentioned Noskova\u2019s opponent, another Czech star in Karolina Muchova. Which is remiss of me, because Muchova contributed enormously to the spectacle followed by a stellar assembly in the Royal Box, actresses Lily Collins, Hannah Waddingham and Jodie Foster among them.<\/p>\n
More to follow…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Linda Noskova avoided the fate of her compatriot Jana Novotna, who famously wept on the shoulder of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":686389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[160074,59,160075,217,101,118,56,54,55,223111,54657,6546],"class_list":["post-686388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-apple-news-free","tag-gb","tag-live-priority","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wimbledon-live","tag-womens-sport","tag-wta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/686389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}