WIMBLEDON — In the end, her defeat came at her own hand.
Three hours and seven minutes into as even a match as we’ve seen in the first round at Wimbledon, Maria Sharapova stepped to the line to serve to protect match point and keep alive her hopes of returning to Centre Court, knowing she was in control of her own destiny – and double faulted. It was her 10th double fault of the match.
“I definitely had several chances, although I was not playing my best tennis,” Sharapova said in her post-match press conference Tuesday night. “I opened up a few doors and was a couple points away from winning this match. But, you know, sometimes you put yourself in winning position and you don’t finish through. That was the case today.”
Sharapova was but one of a string of first-round boldface upsets over the first two days of the tournament – No. 4 Sloane Stephens, No. 5 Elina Svitolina, No. 6 Caroline Garcia and No. 8 Petra Kvitova were all ousted in the first round – and none at the hand of a player ranked higher than 50th in the world. Sharapova, the No. 24 seed, managed to fend off world No. 132 Vitalia Diatchenko of Russia through a first-set tiebreak before losing the second set tiebreak and eventually the third set, 6-4.
“She played all-or-nothing. She swung away. She played extremely aggressive,” Sharapova said of Diatchenko, who handed the 31-year-old the first first-round Wimbledon loss of her career. “I was playing a little bit too defensively for what I should have been doing. She was there to win it, and she did.”
So what’s the deal with the first round at Wimbledon?
“I think it might be because of the quick turnaround, maybe not coming in with a lot of matches,” Sharapova said. “But some players have won a few matches and didn’t come through today, some haven’t played matches and have gone through. You could study that all day long. At the end of the day it just matters who wins the last point.”
World No. 1 Simona Halep, who cruised through her opening-round match in straight sets, said she stepped onto the grass at Centre Court feeling nervous and worried. Like Sharapova, Halep skipped the grass-court warmup events after playing a heavy clay-court season and while all first-round matches require shaking off nerves, she said Wimbledon is especially tricky.
“I say that many times, I really believe it: Here on grass, you don’t know what to expect,” Halep said. “I think every match is important. Every match can go either way. You never know on grass. Everyone can win.”
The 2004 Wimbledon champ, Sharapova last walked onto the grass at All England in 2015 to play a semifinal match against eventual winner Serena Williams, whom Sharapova defeated in that classic 2004 final, the first Grand Slam title of her career. Since returning to the WTA last April after serving an 18-month suspension for taking the controlled drug meldonium, the Russian superstar has struggled with injuries, was denied a wildcard to play in the 2017 French Open and didn’t even request one last year for Wimbledon.
Her best results have been a quarterfinal appearance at the French Open last month, aided by Williams withdrawing from their scheduled fourth-round match with a pectoral injury, and a surprising upset of Halep at last year’s US Open, Sharapova’s first appearance at a Slam in nearly two years.
“Tennis is a process. I’ve certainly made a lot of progress in the last few months, despite this result today,” Sharapova said. “I find myself in a much better position than at this time last year. If I show up and keep putting myself on the line on days where I’m not performing well, I’m able to change that around. At the French Open, I was down 3-0. I gave myself a chance to go through. I played a great match against Karolina [Pliskova, in the third round].
“You could work through all those formulas. But at the end of the day, if I wake up and I want to go out and I want to put the work in, I think that speaks for itself.”
All this begs the question: with the level of parity in women’s tennis today, is it even realistic to expect Sharapova to win another major in a WTA world that has seen seven different Grand Slam winners in the past seven Grand Slams? No longer is winning Slams simply about figuring out how to slip by Serena, and that is assuming the motivation is still there to return to the top.
“It’s always tough to assess that motivation after a first-round loss,” Sharapova said. “I don’t shy away from mistakes and errors, looking back at film, learning from what went wrong. It’s not always pleasant moments, but sometimes those are the ones you need to get better. I have to take away the things that didn’t work well for me and work through those, look for my next opportunities.”
Because she knows that when the next opportunity comes, she can win at her own hand as easily as she let victory slip away today.