Which version of Aryna Sabalenka will walk through the hallowed gates of the All England Club next week? The imperious world No 1 and four-time major champion, or the four-time runner-up, who – for all her dominance at the top of the sport – has won just one of the last six grand slams?
At the halfway point of this season, Sabalenka is the WTA Tour’s greatest enigma. She has been world No 1 for 96 weeks, finishing the last two years as the top-ranked player. She is probably the most consistent on the tour, having reached the quarter-finals or better at the last 14 majors she has entered and a tour-leading nine finals last season, winning a tour-leading four titles. The statistics are impressive.
But so is her ability to, against all odds, malfunction. Under pressure, her game often reverts back to its raw, unvarnished form. When things go wrong for Sabalenka, they go badly wrong.
Nowhere was that more evident than at this year’s French Open. Against the talented but rather unfancied Diana Shnaider, the 25th seed, Sabalenka lost 10 games in a row and 12 of the last 13 as she exited Roland-Garros with scarcely a whimper.
Her usual attitude, when things are going her opponent’s way, is bullish, roaring to herself in encouragement and fist-pumping the crowd and her team at important moments. This was different, strangely subdued for a larger-than-life character on and off the court. Her facial expressions and body language on Court Philippe-Chatrier were the picture of misery. For the player with the tiger tattoo, whose general demeanour on court is of a never-say-die fighter, it was strange to see all resistance simply melt away.
She had recovered a little of her equilibrium, and her gallows humour, by the time she faced the press in the bowels of Philippe-Chatrier, saying, “Just want to quit tennis right now, but we’ll see. I actually have to step back and try to find a solution, because I just am so tired of me losing some matches not in the best way, just because I was overemotional.”
Was it the conditions? She famously struggled in the unpredictable wind in last year’s final defeat to Coco Gauff. Was it the pressure of being the overwhelming favourite, the only grand slam champion left in the draw? Was there simply some strange juju around this tournament, which had seen nailed-on favourite Jannik Sinner melt out of contention the week before?
She said before the match she “felt ready to fight”. “I just think that there is something in a specific moment, that I lose control over the match.” It left her mentally in “a very deep, dark hole.”
The language, and the emotion behind it, was stark. But it was clear the 28-year-old was already trying to process what had gone wrong. She said: “Maybe I’m focusing too much that I never won a slam on each [grass or clay], you know, and maybe it’s kind of made me overthink stuff, make me overemotional at some moment.”
Which made what happened in the next event she played even more bewildering. She returned from that sobering defeat at the WTA 500 tournament in Berlin, reaching the semi-finals. She went a set and 3-1 down in the second-set tiebreak against Jessica Pegula, a player she had beaten in five of their last six encounters, but returned after a two-hour rain delay to win the tiebreak, from which everyone would have expected her to kick on.
But after Pegula broke her serve for 2-0, she utterly capitulated. The American ran away with the third set 6-0, with Sabalenka winning just four points in the final four games, paralysed by indecision and betrayed by her own game.
Per Bounces, there have only been 16 occasions in the last half-century when the WTA No 1 has lost a set 6-0. It has only happened in the final set five times. Two of those five have been by Sabalenka in the last month alone. It is exceedingly rare for such an elite player, so established at the top of the sport, to go missing in action at the crucial point in a match.
Sabalenka reiterated the same point she made at Roland-Garros in Berlin, saying: “I feel like I need to figure out what’s happening, sometimes, in those matches to (be able to) move on and to avoid these situations happening.” It had nearly happened in her quarter-final in the German capital too, but she wrestled back control after slipping 6-2, 4-0 down to Czech 20-year-old Nikola Bartunkova.
It’s a run of results that will leave her low on confidence going into Wimbledon, the slam she has the most complicated relationship with. In theory, her huge game and fearsome serve should feel tailor-made for the slick, fast grass.
But she has never gone beyond the last four, reaching that stage on three occasions, and her win percentage there is her worst of the four majors, while she has only beaten one top-10 player in six appearances. All three of those semi-final defeats were tight three-setters, last year’s a memorable tussle of wills with Amanda Anisimova, who played with a sureness in the closing stages that Sabalenka lacked.
It often feels that Sabalenka is her own worst enemy. Certainly, her game is difficult enough to break down on its own that opponents often need assistance from her mental grip crumbling, too.
There may not be enough time between Berlin and Wimbledon for her to ascertain exactly what is going wrong. She has been open in the past about how much working with a psychologist has helped her on court, but in recent seasons has done away with it. Her recent struggles prove that a player’s game is never entirely complete, that there is always more to be done, even for a player closing in on 100 weeks in top spot.
Perhaps the way forward for the Belarusian is to take a leaf out of her rival Iga Swiatek’s book. The Pole has at times been seized with tension, paralysed by the weight of her own and others’ expectations. Last year, she failed to make a final until the grass swing, ended a 26-match winning streak at the French Open, and fell to eighth in the world rankings, her worst placing in more than four years. For a player of her standards, it was a precipitous decline.
But playing on grass – her worst surface – she appeared to let loose, playing with a newfound freedom, and she romped to the Wimbledon title, surprising even herself. That freedom may be exactly what Sabalenka needs to rediscover if she is to reverse this worrying trend and find herself once again on court – and convert her grass-court potential into a long-awaited Wimbledon crown.
