Martina Navratilova, who is as judicious with her praise as she was with her awesome charge to the net, said before Johanna Konta beat the seven-times slam champion Venus Williams, to reach the final of the Miami Open against Caroline Wozniacki, that the British history-maker was worth her return to the world’s top 10 but had yet to prove she was a top-five player.
It is a fair assessment. Of the game’s consistent pace-setters, Konta and Madison Keys are the newcomers at the summit of the WTA rankings with most to prove; however, Britain’s No1 has had her share of success against most of her peers, and that must be a huge encouragement before Saturday night’s final.
Victory in two tight sets late on Thursday over Williams – her third from four encounters – made Konta the first British finalist in this tournament and ensured she was bumped up one place from No11. If she beats another former world No1 in Wozniacki – most bookmakers have her a slight odds-on favourite – she will move to seventh and will properly have the game’s elite in her sights.
Maybe then Navratilova will regard her as good enough to challenge and beat the top-rated Angelique Kerber, whom she has lost to in their two meetings, Venus’s absent sister, Serena (0-1), the increasingly impressive Karolina Pliskova (1-5), Dominika Cibulkova (1-1) and Simona Halep, whom she defeated handily for the second time in the quarter-finals.
Those are the sport’s best, but all of them are beatable. The trick for Konta and the others in the trailing pack is to win against them regularly at the business end of tournaments. Konta is now in that situation and the evidence is that she is up to the task.
The other top 10 players she must target on a regular basis are Garbiñe Muguruza, whom she has beaten twice in three matches, Svetlana Kuznetsova (1-0), Agnieszka Radwanska (1-2), Keys (1-1) and Elina Svitolina (0-2). She will leapfrog three of them if she can find the potency she showed in beating Wozniacki 6-3, 6-1 at the Australian Open this year.
“I’m definitely going to be looking forward to playing a lot of balls and a lot of tough points,” she said of her match against Wozniacki. “She’s one of the best athletes in the game. She ran a marathon, for goodness sake.”
Wozniacki memorably reigned for more than a year without winning a slam, but she has 25 Tour titles to Konta’s two, and at 26 is only a year older than her, so there is nothing wrong with her pedigree. However, tennis is more than an endurance test. It is mentally where Konta could prove stronger.
She came from 1-3 down in the second set to beat Williams 6-4, 7-5 in a semi-final that lasted two hours and featured eight breaks of serve. As the winner said: “There was so little in this match to go either way.”
It is in those critical moments, when the result is uncertain and the pressure is at its most intense, that Konta has proved she has the fortitude to impose her will on any opponent who shows signs of self-doubt or uncertainty. She ground down the often fragile Halep, despite the mid-match crisis lecture by the Romanian’s coach, Darren Cahill, who reminded her: “You are the better athlete.” Maybe, but Konta proved the better tennis player when it mattered.
For someone who is affable and accommodating to a degree not always evident in upper reaches of professional sport (nobody in or around the locker room has a bad word to say about Konta), she has a ruthless streak that has served her well in rising through the rankings over the past two years. Or, as she put it in classic Konta-speak after beating Williams: “I’m just very pleased that I was able to capitalise on a few more opportunities than her.”
This was the reborn Williams she beat, as well, the 36-year-old former champion good enough to reach the final against her sister in Melbourne this year, not the ghost-like figure who has struggled from day to day since 2011 in her worryingly long fight with the auto-immune disease, Sjogren’s Syndrome.
