Struggling at first, good in the middle, fighting tooth and nail by the end. Such was Caroline Garcia’s summary of the thrillingly unpredictable 4-6, 6-1, 7-6 (7-5) victory over Daria Kasatkina that propelled her to the last four of the WTA Finals. Yet she could have been describing her entire season.
“I was up in the first set and then I kind of lost my focus a little bit, and she came back right away,” said Garcia after two hours and 27 minutes of mesmerising drama that pitted the Frenchwoman’s high-octane brand of attacking tennis against the consistency and counterpunching of the Russian world No 8.
“She’s uses every opportunity she has to put pressure on you, and sometimes I was not able to control my myself enough.
“I think the second set was very clean from my side, and I was really going for it, it was really working well. The third set was a big battle from the beginning. I was trying to be aggressive, she was trying to bring back every ball. It was a crazy scenario.”
It could have been crazier. In contrast with the previous day, when Nancy Richey Group would have been decided by percentage of games won had results fallen differently, this was a straight shootout for the last semi-final spot. That Garcia squeaked home by the narrowest of margins was ultimately down to her unwavering commitment to bold, first-strike tennis in the face of Kasatkina’s frequently impenetrable defensive skills. Time and again, the French sixth seed found herself having to hit one more ball, frequently straying into error as Kasatkina simply refused to lie down.
But Garcia never doubted herself, never stopped pushing, and her reward will come in the form of a semi-final meeting with fifth seed Maria Sakkari, against whom she has twice prevailed previously. It is a scenario Garcia could barely have imagined in May, when she returned to the tour after taking several weeks off to recover from a nagging foot injury. Bereft of confidence and momentum, and without a title in three years, the former world No 4 found herself languishing at 79th, her lowest ranking in eight years.
What no one could have suspected then was that the work she had been putting in with Bertrand Perret, the experienced French coach who joined her team at the end of last season, was about to reap spectacular dividends. Encouraged by Perret to persevere with the audacious brand of first-strike tennis that had brought her success in the past, Garcia went on a summer tear that brought titles on the grass of Bad Homburg, the clay of Warsaw and the hard courts of Cincinnati. As her ranking soared, so too did her belief, propelling her to 13 straight wins that culminated with a first grand slam semi-final at the US Open.
Then, things began to get complicated. Garcia went to Tokyo and lost in the first round. The same fate befell her in San Diego, while in Guadalajara she lasted only a round longer before falling to Sloane Stephens. It was hardly the best preparation for her return to the WTA Finals after a five-year hiatus, and the outlook became bleaker still when Perret left her camp on the eve of the championships muttering darkly of problems that “spoilt the atmosphere”. How would the Frenchwoman fare in the absence of the mastermind behind her renaissance? Pretty well, as it turns out, although she concedes it hasn’t been easy.
“The time after the US Open was definitely tricky and not easy to manage,” said Garcia, alluding to her loss to Shuai Zhang in Tokyo, where she held a match point. “I couldn’t really find my rhythm, and my mentality was not the best one of this year.
“There was a lot of things to manage, obviously. I mean, it’s like in normal life, when you have been travelling with someone and spending time on court for 10 months – it’s not like we were seeing each other when we were off court but, when it was on court, I was seeing Bertrand a lot. The results were good this year, so there was obviously a good connection, and then this person is not there any more, so you have to adjust a little bit.
“On top of this, there is the stress of being qualified for the top eight, where you wanted to do good. So I was definitely putting a lot of pressure on myself. We did a good effort with the team that was present here to keep the great memory of all this year, all I learned.”
Despite the obvious stylistic contrasts, it was also a meeting of kindred spirits, for Kastakina too knows what it is to reclimb the mountain. In late 2018, the 25-year-old broke into the top 10 for the first time; by the end of the following year, crushed by the weight of her own expectations, she was ranked 70th.
Like Garcia, Kasatkina lost confidence in her game. At one point, she even considered quitting tennis altogether. Yet the Russian has reclaimed her place among the elite this season, reaching her first major semi-final at Roland Garros and winning titles in San Jose and Granby ahead of the US Open. Against Garcia, she more than lived up to her good-humoured prediction that she would be forced into the role of “goalkeeper”.
Having driven Garcia to distraction with her defensive skills to recover a 4-2 deficit in the first set, Kasatkina was undone by a pair of double faults early in the second. That sparked a dramatic alteration in the mental balance of the match, with Garcia reeling off six consecutive games. But despite her continued travails on serve, Kasatkina refused to yield, twice recovering from early break in the decider.
The second of those acts of escapology, which came courtesy of a beautiful flicked pick-up and a spectacular running backhand, threatened to shift the momentum decisively in Kasatkina’s favour. Garcia responded in kind, however, battling through a lengthy service game to level at 4-4, and the Russian needed all her resolve to survive the next game, toiling for 13 minutes as she saved six break points. In the end, it all came down to a long, gruelling rally at the end of a long, gruelling tiebreak, a final burst of aggression sealing the win for the net-rushing Garcia.
Kasatkina can nonetheless reflect with satisfaction on a season that has brought a return to the game’s top table in spite of off-court challenges. Unable to compete at Wimbledon because of the tournament’s ban on Russian and Belarusian players, she has been openly critical of her country’s war with Ukraine. She also came out as gay four months ago, revealing that she is in a relationship with the Tallinn-born figure skater Natalia Zabiiako, an equally courageous step given the discrimination towards homosexuality and gender variance in her homeland.
“Of course, it’s tough to lose like this, six in the third at such a big event, and [in] the last match of the year for me. To finish like this hurts, but to look behind [at] everything that happened this season, how the season was going, I have to be really happy and proud of myself.
“Now I’m just hoping to rest and disconnect and recharge, because it’s been a hell of a season, a very long season, a lot of travel, tournaments, matches. A lot of stress as well, not just with [personal] things but with everything that was going on in the world.”
While a well-earned holiday in the Maldives now beckons for Kasatkina, Garcia advances to the semi-finals alongside Iga Swiatek, who completed an unblemished group campaign with a 6-3, 6-0 win over Coco Gauff.