This was veering toward a sadly familiar story for Naomi Osaka.
Straight toward a meltdown, straight toward questions about how she could have thrown away a match that seemed so winnable, in which she seemed in such control.
Her body language was in the dumps, her game was riddled with errors and the wrong kind of emotion. She took a medical timeout in the third set, down a break, and you could see the end coming.
And then Osaka picked herself up off the mat. She regained her composure, she won 10 straight points, she took control of the match and, suddenly, she was marching on into the round of 16.
It took just about everything she had, but Osaka made it past Elise Mertens 6-3, 3-6, 7-5, overcoming herself as much as anything else.
“Honestly, I can’t believe I won this match,” Osaka said in an on-court interview afterward. “I felt like I put my entire heart on the court. And then I just kept trying every single point and you guys [the crowd] were cheering me on, so thank you so much.
“I’m literally shocked that I won this match. I’m not even gonna lie to you.”
After Osaka dominated the first set, Mertens seized control early in the second following a break of Osaka’s serve that seemed to undo her.
After that break, which tied the set at 2-2, Osaka could be heard on the broadcast saying, “I’m f–king slowing down,” afterward. That turned out to be accurate.
She started making unforced errors and her mentality seemed to deteriorate.
After Mertens broke her at 2-2 in the third, Osaka spent the changeover with a towel covering her face.
When she hit a ball into the net down 3-2, she let out a scream, seemingly at herself.
“I was really negative on myself, so I’m really sorry about my behavior,” Osaka said on the court. “For all the little kids watching, I’m really sorry, but this is my favorite tournament, so I really wanted to play well.”
At one point, she took Advil, and later in the third set, took a medical timeout and was visited by a trainer, seemingly for her lower left leg, which was massaged.
That 6-minute break ended up being the turning point.
Osaka won the next 10 points, then staved off a break point to turn a 3-4 deficit into a 5-4 lead in the decisive set. The emotion that seemed as if it would undo her minutes earlier was suddenly carrying her.
All the way to victory.
Osaka, a semifinalist at Wimbledon earlier this year, had not looked her best in the first or second rounds in New York. She needed a pair of tiebreaks to get past Anastasia Zakharova in the first round, and three sets to defeat Katerina Siniakova in the second.
Here, she played her best tennis in spurts, but certainly not throughout.
“I thought I was gonna be OK this match but clearly I was really shaky,” Osaka said. “It took me what, five match points to finish it?”
Maybe, but what did that matter?
In the end, little at all.
