Important events
Good news: Marion works in the communications department and her combination of enthusiasm and analysis is extremely enjoyable.
In the studio they are divided: Henman and Bartoli go Navarro, Lopez Badosa. It’s a neck-and-neck race, in other words.
…and here they come!
Our players are ready…
But let’s go back to today: who will win our first match? Badosa is the better player with the bigger game, so when she plays well it’s hard to see Navarro beating her. But her style is high risk, high reward, and when she’s nervous or inaccurate she’s playing someone who can more than punish her.
Who will win these pots? In the women’s game it’s hard to look beyond Aryna Sabalenka; Iga Swiatek can of course beat her on a really good day, but she doesn’t like this surface and so she’s not as confident as she normally is. Badosa could, on her best day; I don’t think Navarro could.
In the men’s, it feels more open, especially since the only two remaining major-winning players, Jannik Sinner and Daniil Medvedev, are playing each other. But really, almost anyone could do it from here – personally, I’d like to see Grigor Dimitrov do it – it just depends on who finds what they need when they need it.
Preamble
Yo dudes, and welcome to the 2024 US Open – day nine!
For the past eight days we’ve only talked; today we are to talkand we start with an absolutely cracking debate.
Paula Badosa has suffered so much from her back and mental health that she seriously considered quitting the game. It sounds unfortunate when you type it out, but when you really think about it – a potentially brilliant athlete, in her prime, who has sacrificed her youth for her art, and feels unable to continue – you can sense a small sliver of the fear that must have enveloped her. But she has found a way, and over the course of 2024 the former world number two has gradually rediscovered the joyful strength and aggression that makes her special. She has earned this, and she is a threat.
But so too is Emma Navarro. At 23, her game and what it takes to become a top pro is a much fitter and tougher proposition than it used to be. To get to this point, she has beaten both Marta Kostyuk and Coco Gauff in three tough sets, and although she was tight the first time around and looked set to knock the champion out, she learned from it and when the opportunity arose again, she devoured it with extreme prejudice. After beating Gauff to reach the quarter-finals of Wimbledon, she was then trounced by Jasmine Paolini; she will be desperate to show her home crowd that she has learned from that too.
After them at Ashe comes a battle of the highest order. No one without a Grand Slam title has come closer to winning it than Alexander Zverev, who took Carlos Alcaraz the distance in the French Open final after losing a two-set lead to Dominic Thiem in the 2020 final of that competition. With Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic gone, he will feel his moment again – more acutely than ever – and will be given a serve and backhand that are two of the best strokes in the game, and for good reason.
But there’s always a but – in this case Taylor Fritz, on the German’s rise and conqueror at Wimbledon. His serve and forehand have always been mean and still are, but what has changed recently is the belief that he can beat the best on the biggest occasions. He has the game to give Zverev a lot.
If that were all it would be, but there is also a history of needles. While the two players get along well, Zverev struggled at Wimbledon with the support Fritz received from his box, while Instagram posts from Fritz’s girlfriend Morgan Riddle – later deleted – appeared to allude to allegations of domestic abuse against Zverev by two former partners – which Riddle later said were not the case.
We’ll see if there’s any animosity, but either way, we’re ready for what should be a brilliant day of (US Open) tennis. Awesome! Let’s go!
Play: 12:00 local time, 17:00 BST