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Australian Open: No. 1 Simona Halep Survives a Nearly 4-Hour Thriller
MELBOURNE, Australia — Top-seeded Simona Halep survived a marathon third-round battle with 76th-ranked Lauren Davis on Saturday at the Australian Open, ultimately prevailing, 4-6, 6-4, 15-13, after three hours and 44 minutes.
“I’m almost dead,” Halep, a 26-year-old Romanian, said in her on-court interview. “But it’s nice that we could show good tennis.”
Halep saved three match points at 10-11, and she finally served out the match on her fourth try. She had been up a break at 5-4, 6-5 and 8-7 in the third, which lasted two hours and 22 minutes.
Davis, a 24-year-old American, said she had slipped into an autopilot of sorts as the match continued into nearly uncharted scoreboard territory.
“We were both fighting our hearts out,” Davis said. “Every point was just super-long. I mean, I got to the point where I was so tired, where I just told myself to swing and move. And, for the most part, it was very effective, because I didn’t really feel any pressure or anything.”
Davis has worked to build more firepower into her game in recent years, and she hit 52 winners compared with 27 for Halep. Davis held up well through the grueling battle but needed two medical timeouts for foot treatment in the third set. One involved tending to a problem more common among ultrarunners: A toenail began to fall off. After Davis received medical attention for it, her movement appeared unimpeded.
Halep had badly rolled her left ankle during her first-round victory over the Australian wild card Destanee Aiava, but she surprised herself by moving with relative ease in her second-round win over Eugenie Bouchard.
Against Davis, Halep was more aggressive early in rallies and dominated their shorter exchanges, while the American consistently prevailed in longer rallies.
For better or worse, Halep said, she could not feel her ankle, which was tightly taped and numbed by painkillers.
Darren Cahill, who has coached Halep for several years, said she prevailed because she had “really toughened up over the past couple of years.”
“She’s battling out every single match,” Cahill said. “Whoever won that match, I thought it was a minor miracle to go through the ups and downs of that, the roller coaster. I said to her, ‘I’m not sure I’ve sat through a more emotional tennis match, in all my years of coaching.’”
“It’s one for the ages, and a credit to both ladies,” he added. “I thought they were magnificent.”
Halep’s survival came three days after second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki saved two match points to keep herself in the tournament, and two days after third-seeded Garbiñe Muguruza was eliminated in the third round. Altogether, three of the top seven seeds in the women’s draw have departed.
And Halep survived only by battling through one of the toughest matches in the tournament’s history. It tied the record for most games in a women’s match at this event, but was not the longest in time spent. That was played in 2011, when Francesca Schiavone beat Svetlana Kuznetsova, 16-14, in the third set of a match that lasted a full hour more than Halep’s win over Davis.
Halep’s next opponent will be Naomi Osaka, who defeated 18th-seeded Ashleigh Barty, 6-4, 6-2. Osaka, ranked 72nd in the world, had 12 aces and 24 winners. Barty was the last Australian woman remaining in the singles draw.
Madison Keys, a United States Open finalist, also moved through to the fourth round, with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Ana Bogdan at Margaret Court Arena.
The 17th-seeded Keys, who lost in the United States Open final last year to Sloane Stephens, saved three break points serving for the match before clinching it on her first match point when Bogdan netted a backhand.
Keys missed last year’s Australian Open after having surgery to repair her injured left wrist. She then played only one match after the U.S. Open before shutting down her season early to let the wrist heal. It has helped her start the new season feeling mentally fresh, as well.
“I finished the U.S. Open and I was exhausted,” she said. “So as amazing as that run was, the combination of being exhausted from that and having a wrist that still wasn’t 100 percent perfect, I just needed to kind of shut it down, calm down, and then I was really excited to start the new season.”
Keys is the only one of the four American women who reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open last September still in contention in Melbourne — Stephens, Venus Williams and CoCo Vandeweghe were all eliminated in the first round.
Keys will next play Caroline Garcia, a 6-3, 5-7, 6-2 winner over Aliaksandra Sasnovich.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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