Featuring a jam-packed and star-studded cast at SW19, the third Grand Slam of the season, surely, did not disappoint as the return of the likes of Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams, and Stan Wawrinka added to the more dramatic flavor of Wimbledon while the majority of the seeds failed to propagate greener pastures and advance to further rounds.
As early as the first week, the tournament had already seen some of the top 10 seeds in both the men’s and women’s side come crashing against lower-ranked players, highlighted by the downfalls of pre-tournament favorites Petra Kvitova, Caroline Wozniacki, Venus Williams, Sloane Stephens, and Alexander Zverev.
By the end of the third round, only seventh seed Karolina Pliskova remained in contention at the Round of 16 at the ladies’ side, before she was eventually dispatched by 20th seed Kiki Bertens in two straight sets, 6-3, 7-6(1).
On the other hand, third seed Zverev, who was expected to challenge Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal prior to the tournament after an encouraging French Open, was shut down in a decisive five set against Ernest Gulbis to make him in doubts of saddling the responsibility of becoming the future of the tour as the 21-year old German is still yet to make past a quarterfinal of a Slam.
Indeed, this year’s Wimbledon has become a testament of how the lower-ranked players can now go toe-to-toe against the top seeds, but despite the exciting and fun upsets for the underdogs, the expectations for the favorites have really become disappointments.
Marin Cilic blows a 2-0 lead against Guido Pella
After two remarkable championship matches over the last four Grand Slam events including last year’s Wimbledon, prized Croatian Marin Cilic bowed out early in the second round after squandering a two-set lead against Argentina’s Guido Pella, 6-3, 6-1, 4-6, 6-7, 5-7 in their two-day affair.
Just when Cilic seemed to be putting the finishing touches on Wednesday evening, two rain interruptions delayed what has been a very hot and sunny play between the third seed and Pella in the third set and eventually postponed their match when Cilic had gone a break down in that set.
As soon as the match resumed on Thursday morning, the Argentine seemed to have found his composure and even said that the “rain had helped” him to secure the five-set victory over Cilic.
A lot of players have obviously attributed the grass for the series of upsets that has happened over the last two weeks but the case of the 2017 runner-up, fairly enough, is a different one as Cilic became one of the unfortunate victims of nature.
“It was a little bit unfortunate to stop last night when I was a break down. And, also when we came back, the court was slippery,” said Cilic.
Caroline Wozniacki continues to decline in the majors
Speaking of natural interruptions, world’s number two Caroline Wozniacki seemed to be fazed by a rather different bad luck of the environment when during one point in her match against unseeded Ekaterina Makarova, she was seen asking for an insect repellent over the umpire due to flying ants.
“It was definitely a first for me here,” she said.
However, that wasn’t particularly the case though, as after hoisting the Australian Open women’s singles trophy last January, Wozniacki’s performance in the majors became really disappointing and her 6-4, 1-6, 5-7 defeat against Makarova adds up to her latest woes in the Grand Slam.
Prior to winning the Eastbourne International title against Aryna Sabalenka as a warm-up tournament for Wimbledon, Wozniacki got eliminated in the fourth round of the Roland Garros by 21-year old rising star Daria Kasatkina in two straight sets, 6-7, 3-6, and since then the 2017 WTA Finals champion continued to underperform.
In the fifth set, for instance, Wozniacki got the best of the Russian’s power hitting after coming up from 1-5 and breaking four straight match points at 3-5 to battle her way back at 5-all and a chance to win the match but Makarova, who was obviously a better doubles than a singles player, held on to advance and beat the Dane in a one-on-one matchup for the second time since the 2017 US Open.
Garbine Muguruza fails to defend her title
After successive thrilling upsets in the first week, the ladies’ defending champion Garbine Muguruza added to the list of top knights to fall early in SW19 after a shocking three-setter defeat against world number 47 Belgian Alison van Uytvanck, 7-5, 2-6, 1-6, admitting that her mindset really had an impact in her match.
With a seemingly unbeatable self in the first round against Naomi Broady, Muguruza’s game changed a little bit and became less passive in the round of 64, especially after a first set tie-break, proven by a measly combined three games won in the second and third set.
After the match against van Uytvanck, Muguruza, who will drop to number 7 in the WTA rankings, honestly confessed that she “wasn’t thinking really” that she has “to defend anything,” and that her changed in mindset and confidence to just go and win it again paid the price as it obviously weighed her down to become the earliest women’s defending champion to exit since Steffi Graf in 1994.
In context, however, Muguruza’s loss was a not a new concept as the instance of top female players losing early in the majors has become a seemingly repeating and consistent situation as mass upsets in the women’s draw have been the theme of the Grand Slams since 2010.
Van Uytvanck’s come-from-behind win proved that the low-ranked players in the women’s side are continuing to be a threat against the top players as the pool of rankings become more congested and heavily overcrowded as the unseeded players today were simply just top players who temporarily dropped their rankings due to injuries and rests as in the case of Serena Williams, who only needed to four tournaments since her maternity leave to come back inside the top 30.
Similarly, though, the idea of ‘false rankings’ is also evident in the men’s side as well as Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov suffered a four-set opening round defeat against three-time Slam champion Stan Wawrinka, who is now wandering somewhere in the Top 200.
Simona Halep loses from out of nowhere
Fresh from a maiden Grand Slam title at the Roland Garros, and with a guaranteed retained position as the world number 1 following the defeats of Wozniacki and Muguruza, Simona Halep had the chance to double her majors’ trophy, but her hopes to becoming a multi-titled champion was derailed by a stunning defeat against Hsieh Su-wei in the third round.
Halep was up a set against Hsieh early in the match when an improbable happened as the Taiwanese finally ended the top-seeded Romanian’s demolition on the Asian players in Wimbledon after pushing a deciding set that led to a tie-breaker in which she won, 3-6, 6-4, 7-5.
Leading to the round of 32, Halep has never dropped a single set against Japanese Kurumi Nara, 6-2, 6-4, and China’s Zheng Saisai, to whom she even scored a bagel, 7-5, 6-0, but Hsieh’s aggressive game towards the baseline pushed her to her limits and set the tone for a circuit governed by chaos.
Hsieh’s knock out on Halep, and Pliskova’s eventual fourth round loss, was only the first time in the Open Era that the all of the top 10 seeds of a Slam failed to reach the quarterfinals, and remarkably the first time since Wimbledon used the 32-seed seeding instead of the 16 seeds in 2001.
Until now, furthermore, at least four of the top 10 had always reached the fourth round, and while the result of this year’s Wimbledon is yet another example of what is happening every year, the indication on the seeding restructure proposal last fall to go back to the 16 seeds because of the struggle of lower-ranked players to go to the top might just be re-evaluated.
Roger Federer gets served up by Kevin Anderson
With a semifinal slot within reach and a match point in the third set, eight-time champion Roger Federer almost secured another historic year in his most favorite tournament, only to succumb to willful and confident Kevin Anderson who pulled off the biggest upset of the tournament by defeating the former in five sets, 6-7, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5.
The 2017 champion, Federer, who after winning his eighth title last year at the All England Club without dropping a single set, suffered extreme shock at the hands of the big-serving Anderson to yield his earliest loss at Wimbledon in five years since he bowed out in the semifinals against Sergiy Stakhovsky in 2013.
“I feel horribly fatigued and just awful. It’s just terrible. But that’s how it goes, you know. Credit to him,” said the tired and wearied Federer after losing the first of his last seven five-set matches.
The expectations were really high for Federer, who after dominating the 6-foot-8 South African in just 23 minutes in the first set, seemed to be in a rush to immediately book a ticket to the semifinal, but Anderson eventually found a way aside from getting along with The Swiss Maestro’s service game through hitting incredible groundstrokes from the baseline in the final three sets.
In a battle of two of the tournament’s best servers, Federer and Anderson played one of the longest sets in the overall event as strangely enough, the fifth set went on to as long as 90 minutes which ties the duration of Federer’s first two matches.
Anderson, who reached his first Wimbledon final against Novak Djokovic and second Grand Slam final since the 2017 US Open, stayed through the match by becoming just the third player ever to beat Federer from two sets down in a Grand Slam event—joining Jo-Wilfired Tsonga and Novak Djokovic—and snapped the Swiss’ 85 straight service holds and potentially set-winning streak.
With his loss, Federer became the first No. 1 seed to lose any Grand Slam match when holding a two-set lead since Lleyton Hewitt fell to Tommy Robredo in 2003, though it is only the fifth time, and third in his 269 Grand Slam matches, that he squandered a two-set lead.
Federer will slide back as the world number 2, while his conqueror, Anderson, will step inside the Top 5 after Wimbledon.
Follow the writer on Twitter: @KristoffBellen
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