After ending Aryna Sabalenka’s unbeaten start to the season in Dubai on Thursday, Barbora Krejcikova was asked to comment on the growing consistency that the Belarusian, along with Iga Swiatek and Elena Rybakina, has brought to the top of the women’s game.
“Why do you need consistency?” replied Krejcikova. “There’s so many good players.
“Each of us can beat anybody, that’s how it is. It’s not boring, not the same person winning all the time – unless Iga last year. She was winning everything. But that was for four months, so let’s see.”
Coming from a woman who watches as much tennis as Krejcikova, the suggestion that Swiatek’s pre-eminence was limited to four months seemed mischievously pointed. When she is not playing herself, Krejcikova is a perennial presence in the stands at tournaments, and it will not have escaped her notice that Swiatek’s victory roll ranged well beyond the 37-match winning streak that earned her six consecutive titles between February and June of last year.
A dedicated student of the game, Krejcikova will have looked on with interest as the Pole was crowned US Open champion last September, just as she will have known that Swiatek won in San Diego the following month. And it was only a superb performance by Krejcikova herself, in the final of October’s Ostrava Open, that denied Swiatek a late-season treble.
So it seemed slightly disingenuous for the Czech to suggest that Swiatek’s dominance was confined to the early part of the year, and decidedly bullish when she punctuated her analysis with that final “let’s see”.
See she did, though, halting Swiatek’s barnstorming progress through the early part of the Middle Eastern swing with a brilliant 6-4, 6-2 victory that offered further evidence of her ability to discomfit the world No 1. If Krejcikova appears more confident than most when confronted by Swiatek, it is with good reason. Krejcikova has now won the two most recent of the four meetings between the pair, and also held match points in a third, in Rome in 2021. It is clearly a difficult matchup for Swiatek, who has yet to find a convincing solution to the Czech’s variety, precision and disguise.
Rarely rushed or thrown off balance, Swiatek was run ragged here, her customary baseline dominance neutered by Krejcikova’s ability to take the ball on the rise and redirect her groundstrokes into the corners. The French and US Open champion struggled merely to get a read on the ball, let alone deal with the savage punishment Krejcikova meted out to her second serve, behind which she won just four points.
It all made for an incongruous spectacle, particularly after the imperious run of form that carried Swiatek to an emphatic title defence in Doha last week, and which saw her advance to a second straight final for the loss of just nine games. The concern for the 21-year-old will lie not only in Krejcikova’s ability to replicate last October’s victory in Ostrava, but also in the apparent ease with which the world No 30 adapted that game style from an indoor court in the eastern Czech Republic to a quicker outdoor surface in Dubai.
“Today was a different match, different conditions, different everything,” said Krejcikova, who hailed Swiatek’s achievements as a source of motivation afterwards. “I think I chose the right strategy. I was doing what I should have been doing. I think I started really well. It was really important that I got it. I felt that I was getting the chances to beat her, and I’m really happy that I did.”
The 27-year-old, who claimed her maiden grand slam title at the French Open two years ago but had never previously won a WTA 1000 event, now finds herself in elite company. Having followed up her quarter-final victory over Sabalenka, the world No 2 and newly crowned Australian Open champion, with a three-set win over Jessica Pegula, the world No 3, she becomes only the fifth player to beat the world’s top three at the same tournament since the women’s rankings were introduced in 1975. Only Steffi Graf, Serena and Venus Williams and Sabalenka – who saw off Ons Jabeur, Pegula and Swiatek at last year’s WTA Finals – have previously accomplished the feat.
“It’s a big achievement, it’s a really big tournament for me,” said Krejcikova. “I had so many big wins that I enjoyed, that I really appreciate. I think I was showing my best tennis this weekend, with every single game I was improving.”
Swiatek, whose focus will now shift to the defence of her Indian Wells and Miami Open titles next month, will likewise seek to get better – although not before she conducts a thorough post-mortem on her latest performance against a player who has now handed her two of only three defeats she has suffered in her 15 tour-level finals.
“I couldn’t find the rhythm, it was much different than the last couple of rounds,” said Swiatek, who was taken aback by her inability to sustain the level she showed against Coco Gauff in the semi-finals.
“I don’t know if that’s my fault or [whether] Barbara made that situation, but for sure she used it and played pretty smart.
“From my side, I still need to analyse and see what I’ve done wrong, because it surprises me that there is such a difference in that feeling that you get on court over [the course of] a day.
“So for sure I’m going to focus on that, then just look at it from a different perspective to understand a little bit more. Right now, it’s hard for me to say what made the difference.”
A large part of the answer lies in the simple fact that Krejcikova, whose 2022 season was blighted by an elbow injury that prevented her from making a meaningful defence of her French Open title, is fully fit once more and back in the kind of form that lifted her to a career-high ranking of No 2 this time last year. Not unjustifiably, Krejcikova sees herself not merely as a disruptor of the top three, but as a member of that elite trio in her own right – as she was not slow to point out when asked about her ranking, which will rise 14 places to 16th following her success in Dubai.
“I was injured for four months last year,” said the Czech. “That’s why I’m not in the top three. That’s the reason.”
On this evidence, she is not wrong. Roland Garros promises to be fascinating.