Of all the strange events to have unfolded during this unique Australian Open, few moments have been as peculiar as the draw ceremony. Instead of its usual glamorous presentation, the draw was livestreamed from a claustrophobic office in Melbourne Park where the coordinator badly mispronounced countless names and nobody could see the pairings.
When they were finally published, the consensus was clear: Naomi Osaka had been handed a tough draw, potentially filled with a series of prominent opponents who are more than capable of beating her if she lets them.
She has simply not allowed them to play though. On Wednesday Osaka strolled into the third round with ease, dominating the former world No 4 Caroline Garcia in a 6-2, 6-3 victory. It followed her 6-1, 6-2 first-round demolition of Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, a former top-15 player who has reached the Australian Open quarter-final for two consecutive years.
Against Garcia, Osaka served faultlessly, winning 83% of the points and crunching 10 aces in her short time on court while her first serve scaled 121mph. She also controlled the baseline, dictating with contained aggression and choosing the right moments to tear a point apart with an injection of pace from either wing. Osaka finished the match with an ace. She is playing almost as well as she ever has in the opening rounds of a slam.
A clear measure of Osaka’s mental strength is that her level is a direct consequence of the opposition. Players often refuse to look at their draws lest they think too far ahead and psyche themselves out, but before the tournament Osaka caught a glimpse of tweets describing the difficulty of her projected draw. Instead of unsettling her, it simply underlined that she had no choice but to be ready. “I feel it might have also helped in a way, I calmed my nerves because I felt like I couldn’t afford to be that nervous,” she said.
Osaka has arrived at a notable point in her career as she matures from a young star into an established top player. The Australian Open has played some role. A year ago, she lost in the fourth round in a dreadful performance against the then 15-year-old Coco Gauff. She detested that loss and the sensation of feeling as though she had something to prove each time she stepped on to the court.
“There’s just a lot of stuff that happened there, surrounding that time, that it really made me think a lot about my life and what is the reason, like: ‘Am I playing tennis to prove stuff to other people or am I playing to have fun because I enjoy it?’ From there I just took that attitude and tried to move forward with it. It’s something that I was doing in New York. I think that I’m doing it here, too,” she said this week.
There is also a bigger picture in mind. Osaka has won three grand slam titles, but they account for half of her WTA titles. She has marked herself as a mental giant capable of producing her best in the biggest moments, but she needs to replicate those skills everywhere.
“My career, it’s been up and down a lot and people don’t really know when I’m going to do well in a tournament or when I’m not,” she said. “My ultimate goal is just to at least reach the quarter-finals or better at every tournament and hopefully win most of them. If not, then just to give a really good performance.”
As Osaka strolled into the third round, others struggled. The No 8 seed, Bianca Andreescu, was unable to take her comeback any further as she fell 6-3, 6-2 to Hsieh Su-wei on Rod Laver Arena. The ninth seed, Petra Kvitova, was scuppered in three sets by Sorana Cirstea, one of the loudest and most critical voices from the hard quarantine.
Simona Halep dug out a gutsy win over the home favourite Ajla Tomljanovic, recovering from 5-2 down in the third set to edge into the third round with a 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 win.
Serena Williams, however, has matched the quality of Osaka’s performances and little more. Moving extremely well she won 6-3, 6-0 against Nina Stojanovic.
