The last couple of days have served as a reminder that playing tennis when level or behind is very different from playing when ahead, especially for underdogs.<\/p>\n
Saturday, Denis Shapovalov got to 40-40 on his own serve at 3-1 in the third set against Jannik Sinner. Sinner\u2019s shoelace snapped, so he paused to change his shoe, giving Shapovalov time to think he likely did not need. <\/p>\n
Sinner put on his shoes, broke Shapovalov\u2019s serve and rolled to victory untroubled from there.<\/p>\n
And over on Louis Armstrong Stadium, Taylor Townsend got herself to within a point of beating Barbora Krej\u010d\u00edkov\u00e1 on no fewer than eight occasions. <\/p>\n
She couldn\u2019t seize the moment, undone by her own caution while ahead and Krej\u010d\u00edkov\u00e1\u2019s freedom when behind, with the Czech blazing winners onto the lines to save several of them.<\/p>\n
The ability to step up in such moments is a part of what separates players such as Sinner and Krej\u010d\u00edkov\u00e1, multiple Grand Slam singles champions, from the rest of the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last couple of days have served as a reminder that playing tennis when level or behind is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-125262","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}