In tears after the third-round match, the defending champion said, “I think I’m going to take a break from playing for a while.”
Naomi Osaka, the defending women’s singles champion, was upset, 5-7, 7-6 (2), 6-4, in the third round of the U.S. Open on Friday night by Leylah Annie Fernandez, an unseeded 18-year-old from Canada.
During her post-match news conference Osaka was in tears.
“I honestly don’t know when I’m going to play my next tennis match,” she said. “I think I’m going to take a break from playing for a while.”
She flashed two thumbs up and left the room crying.
The 73rd-ranked Fernandez, a quick and dynamic left-hander, had never faced Osaka, but she did not appear intimidated, clenching her fist after winning key points and often dictating play with her topspin forehand.
It was a memorable evening for teenagers in Arthur Ashe Stadium. In the preceding match, Carlos Alcaraz, a dynamic Spanish 18-year-old, eliminated the No. 3 men’s seed, Stefanos Tsitsipas, in a momentum-shifting thriller that came down to a fifth-set tiebreaker. That was the final match of the day session, and when the arena had been cleared and the night-session crowd had taken their seats, Fernandez followed Alcaraz’s lead, rallying to defeat the third-seeded Osaka.
The upset came on the same court where Osaka had become a global star by surprising Serena Williams to win the 2018 U.S. Open. Osaka has since won three more Grand Slam singles titles, including one at last year’s Open.
Osaka broke Fernandez’s serve at 5-5 in the second set with a backhand winner and then served for the match. She had not faced even a break point at that stage but was unable to close out the victory. Fernandez went on to win the first five points of the ensuing tiebreaker, prompting Osaka to hurl her racket to the court. Fernandez then evened the match at one set apiece.
“I guess I wanted to stay on the court a little bit longer, and I wanted to put on a show for everybody here,” Fernandez said in her post-match interview. “One hour was just not enough for me on court.”
Fernandez quickly took the lead in the third set by breaking Osaka’s serve again in the opening game, and though Osaka began to find her range in her own service games, she could not solve Fernandez’s slower left-handed serve.
Osaka did not hide her frustration. After Fernandez hit a net-cord winner in the second game of the final set to go up, 40-15, Osaka took hold of the ball and smacked it high into the stands, receiving a code violation for ball abuse.
Fernandez would face no break points on her serve in the final set, and when it came time to serve for the most significant victory of her career, she held at love. At 30-0, she hit a terrific backhand drop-shot winner, and on her first match point, Osaka misjudged a forehand and hit it wide.
Arms up and smiling, Fernandez jogged forward to the net for the handshake.
“From the very beginning, right before the match, I knew I was able to win,” she said.
Fernandez’s victory was the first major upset of the U.S. Open women’s tournament, which, despite the depth of talent in the women’s game, had largely respected the seedings in the first two rounds. But Friday’s result was the latest setback for Osaka, the biggest star in the women’s game after Serena Williams. Since winning the Australian Open in February, she has played sparingly and has not won another title or even reached another semifinal.
Osaka withdrew from the French Open after winning one round after she was fined for declining to take part in the mandatory post-match news conference. Later she explained in a post on social media that she had experienced depression since winning the 2018 U.S. Open and had often found it difficult to face the news media. She returned to her home in Los Angeles and decided to skip Wimbledon but returned to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, where she became the first tennis player to light the Olympic cauldron but lost in the third round to Marketa Vondrousova.
She was beaten in the round of 16 of the WTA 1000 event in Cincinnati by Jil Teichmann in her only North American tournament before this year’s Open. After defeating Maria Bouzkova in straight sets in the first round in New York, she received a walkover in the second round when Olga Danilova withdrew because of illness.
But because of her lack of recent match play, the unexpected break did not turn out to be an advantage. Fernandez, brimming with energy, was able to capitalize.
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