Elena Rybakina must have figured she had the match won. She\u2019d just battered 18-year-old Victoria Mboko in a 25-shot rally late in their Montreal semifinal, sending her sprinting from corner to corner until Mboko\u2019s desperate lob drifted long. Mboko hunched over in exhaustion afterwards, her racket pressed hard into the ground as a crutch. Losing a miserable point like this, reminiscent of the godforsaken PACER test, typically comes with a hangover. The fatigued player often pulls the cord early in the rally in a desperate bid to get their breath back and misses by a mile, or produces a meatball drop shot. The score here was tied\u20144-all in the do-or-die third-set tiebreak\u2014but Rybakina had all the momentum and a seemingly significant fitness advantage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So I thought. At 4-all, Mboko clobbered four forehands, but coherently rather than desperately. The last one tagged the sideline for a winner. Mboko grabbed the next two points as well to win the match, leaving my tennis logic in tatters. Rybakina\u2019s epic rally just a minute earlier had somehow worked against her, proving the last point she would win rather than the boon I\u2019d expected. That wasn\u2019t Mboko\u2019s only miracle act of the match: She\u2019d saved a match point half an hour earlier. This proved too much for my Tennis Channel stream, which promptly buckled under the tension and crashed. Mboko broke serve to prolong the match twice, outlasting both Rybakina and TC\u2019s notorious technical difficulties.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
What was it about this Canadian teenager, at the time ranked just 85th in the world? Almost all veteran players are still trying and failing to perfect the inhuman ability to play each point on its own merits, with no thought of past or future. Mboko, a wild card at the tournament, apparently had already. She made plenty of mistakes on relatively important points, but hardly ever on the most vital, as if she were paying an error quota to ensure equilibrium on match point. Mboko did all this while playing at a fast pace and with a preternatural placidity. Rafael Nadal\u2019s grating if humanizing<\/a> inter-point rituals are not needed here, nor are Novak Djokovic\u2019s theatrical gasps after every trace of physical discomfort. All the strength is within. Though the better player in terms of forehands and backhands, Rybakina still found herself competing against an impossibly high mental standard. How Mboko had managed to dictate the battleground of the match seemed a new and mysterious magic worthy of intensive study.\u00a0<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t want to get too ahead of myself, though. Rybakina is the 10th-ranked player on the WTA and won Wimbledon in 2022, but has struggled in the presence of an abusive coach<\/a> (who has now successfully appealed a tour-enforced one-year ban<\/a>). She has gotten worse at closing out matches during this period, and blown leads have piled up. Maybe Rybakina had just choked\u2014after all, she made unforced errors on the final two points after Mboko\u2019s heroic forehand, so the teen didn\u2019t have to keep playing proactively. In Thursday’s final, Mboko would play Naomi Osaka, the four-time major champion, resurgent after a difficult comeback from motherhood, whose rally ball could knock down walls. Osaka arrived in Montreal armed with a new coach, Tomasz Wiktorowski, who was in Iga Swiatek\u2019s corner during her rise to world domination. After a precarious first round, Osaka cruised to the final in terrifying form. She could deny Mboko a chance to even use that advanced sorcery, if it indeed existed.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the first set, Osaka did just that. She ripped through it, 6-2, coolly dominating the rallies, overruling Mboko\u2019s defense with shots so hard and heavy they couldn\u2019t be effectively redirected. But early in the second set, the match took an odd turn. Mboko was suddenly breaking Osaka\u2019s serve at will. Osaka\u2019s rampaging rhythm from the first set vanished. Mboko went up two breaks, and despite a plague of double faults so vicious it looked capable of erasing that advantage entirely, closed out the set to tie the match.\u00a0<\/p>\n Belatedly, I realized another layer of the Mboko riddle: She could vary her style drastically from point to point. She\u2019d bash a backhand inside-out for a winner, then prioritize consistency and court coverage in the next rally. Her identity as a player isn\u2019t as simple as offensive- or defensive-minded\u2014one point she\u2019s a wall, the next, she\u2019s a weapon. She\u2019d double fault three times in a game, then start spraying aces. Mboko\u2019s forehand is not naturally powerful\u2014full sets can go by without her registering a winner from that wing\u2014but she is sufficiently confident in it to hit hard, flat forehands that do real damage.\u00a0<\/p>\n With no idea what to expect on any given point and an opponent unfazed by anything she threw at her, Osaka\u2019s form evaporated. The match descended into an error-fest, which suited Mboko just fine. She\u2019d make a bad error and move on, while Osaka would miss and castigate herself. At 1-5, Osaka hit a drop shot\u2014definitely a winner, I thought\u2014then stood stock-still as Mboko improbably came streaking forward to poke it past her<\/a>. The last two games were a formality, with Osaka tapped out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Some have emerged from the match questioning Osaka\u2019s mettle. Do not be fooled! She has saved match point en route to a major title<\/a>, survived the indignity of blowing three match points of her own in a major final and won anyway, and endured a comeback littered with close losses and ill-timed injuries. As her Threads account<\/a> indicates, Osaka suffers from several relatable anxieties, but she does not simply quit when the going gets tough. The new factor here was Mboko, who systematically shattered Osaka\u2019s resistance, rather than merely capitalizing on it shattering independently. I expect her to leave a litany of confused, defeated opponents in her wake over the next decade-plus that bears this impression out.<\/p>\n Think about it: Who\u2019s safe from a player who is bothered by nothing, can play any style on any given point, and can hang with the biggest ballstrikers? Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, has self-sabotaging tendencies<\/a> at which Mboko\u2019s eyes will light up. Iga Swiatek<\/a> battles mid-match distress as often as Osaka. Mirra Andreeva, the prodigious No. 5 just four months older than Mboko, may be a bigger hitter but has lately struggled to prevent rowdy crowds or unexpected mid-match bumps from jamming up her game. Coco Gauff is virtually unflappable and shares Mboko\u2019s ability to win when none of her shots are operating at full capacity, but leans a bit more on defense than unpredictability. Those two met earlier in the Montreal tournament; Gauff played poorly, which usually means she grinds out a win in a third-set tiebreak. Mboko smoked her, 6-1, 6-4.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s time for things to go wrong, of course. Playing in front of an adoring home crowd didn\u2019t hurt Mboko one bit, and many prodigies warp under the weight of the emotional scar tissue a long tour tenure inevitably imposes. And that\u2019s to say nothing about physical injuries: Mboko fell on her wrist during the Rybakina match, and though you\u2019d never know it from how she played in Montreal, it\u2019ll keep her out of the Cincinnati Open. That tournament will be worse without her. After it ends, I can\u2019t wait to watch her at the U.S. Open, where I suspect she\u2019ll be wreaking mental havoc on whoever has the misfortune to be in her draw.\u00a0<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elena Rybakina must have figured she had the match won. 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