From the moment the Australian Open draw was made, Iga Swiatek was staring down the barrel.
Danger lurked at every turn and yet, after winning a tough opener against Sofia Kenin, the 2020 champion, and then recovering from the brink of defeat against Danielle Collins, her semi-final conqueror two years ago, a route through the top half appeared to be clearing for the Polish world No 1. That impression deepened when Elena Rybakina, last year’s finalist and a potential semi-final opponent, subsequently suffered a shock early exit.
Instead, however, Swiatek became the biggest casualty of the tournament so far, a contest initially in her grasp slipping through her fingers in the face of a tenacious and powerful performance from Linda Noskova, a 19-year-old Czech making her main draw debut at Melbourne Park.
While Noskova’s 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory earned her a place in the second week of a major for the first time, for Swiatek it concluded an 18-match winning streak dating back to late September. It was the Pole’s earliest grand slam loss since Alizé Cornet ended her 37-match unbeaten streak two summers ago at Wimbledon, also in the third round.
“I felt like I had everything under control,” said Swiatek, who was a set up and comfortable on serve until Noskova drilled a pair of forehand winners to claim a love break in the eighth game of the second set.
“I think she just went all in without any pressure. She probably knew that she has nothing to lose, you know? Maybe I should have done that when I had break points in previous games, but I wanted to be the solid version of myself.
“I had a couple of chances to break her in second set and I didn’t use them. So that’s a shame. But when she broke me, she was kind of proactive. I wanted to do that as well later, in the next games. Sometimes I was rushing it. I just wasn’t playing kind of with my intuition and naturally.”
Those difficulties owed much to Noskova’s weight of shot, which kept Swiatek off balance and denied her time to set up, particularly on the forehand, and especially when the Czech began taking her backhand up the line more frequently. Twenty of Swiatek’s 33 unforced errors came off the forehand, with almost half those mistakes occurring in the final set.
Even so, it would be doing both players a disservice to suggest that this was simply another example of Swiatek’s oft-cited vulnerability to power players. Noskova hits a big ball, but she also has a knack for hitting the right ball. When Swiatek lost to Jelena Ostapenko at last year’s US Open, the Pole was on the receiving end of a relentless onslaught of hell-for-leather ball-striking to which she was rendered more susceptible by poor shot selection. Noskova’s approach was more varied: rather than relying simply on brute force, the teenager deployed sudden changes of pace and direction to keep Swiatek guessing and prevent her from establishing her usual commanding rhythm from the baseline.
Nor was it simply a case of the world No 50 gleefully taking advantage of a free hit against a woman ranked 49 places above her. There was genuine conviction in Noskova’s play; her attitude was that of a player with everything to win, rather than nothing to lose.
“Playing on such a court for a first time, playing with Iga for a second time, I really wanted to win this,” said Noskova, who won just five games in her only previous meeting with Swiatek. “I know my game. I know that I have improved a lot in the last year and a half, year. I just believed [in] my game tonight.
“I really wanted this win because I didn’t really come to that court with the thought of, like, I have nothing to lose. I took it very seriously. It was like a match as any other.
“When I’m going to be aggressive, I can play with anyone. Obviously there will be matches when I will not play my best. But tonight, especially when I warmed up, I was feeling pretty good. Physically I was just fine.
“I was coming there on court [not only] to have a great match, but to win it.”
That she did that will feel all the sweeter after the events of last year, when Noskova reached her first WTA 500 final in Adelaide, rising from 102 to 56 in the rankings as result, but too late to claim a place in the main draw at Melbourne Park. Overlooked for a wild card, the Czech went on to lose to Katherine Sebov of Canada in the first round of qualifying. One year on, she will face Elina Svitolina, a 6-2, 6-3 winner over Switzerland’s Viktorija Golubic, for a place in the quarter-finals.
Swiatek, meanwhile, who has added new dimensions to her game in the three and a half months since she was last beaten, promised to “get back to work”.
“I lost, but I’m going to have more tournaments,” said the four-time grand slam champion. “I remember last year, just getting back to work. I could reset and just focus on the next tournaments. So I’m going to do the same this year.”