LONDON — If tennis were played on paper, Angelique Kerber‘s second-round match against 18-year-old American Claire Liu and defending champion Garbine Muguruza‘s meeting with unseeded Belgian Alison Van Uytvanck would have been fly-bys at best.
Kerber is a former world No. 1 and two-time Grand Slam champ. Liu is ranked No. 237 in the world and was playing in only her second main-draw match at the All England Club (her first was Tuesday). Muguruza, also a two-time Slam winner, faced a player who had advanced out of the second round at a major only once.
But considering that as of Wednesday, five of the top-10 seeds in the women’s draw were spending the remainder of the fortnight preparing for the hard-court season, no match at Wimbledon, no matter the round nor tale of the tape, is a foregone conclusion. Until the final point of her 3-6, 6-2, 6-4 comeback win over Liu was recorded on Thursday, it was unclear whether Kerber would be able to stave off the unrelenting Wimbledon rookie and keep her name off a growing list of top-seed upsets. Several hours later, Muguruza was unable to match Kerber’s comeback. In the final two sets, the 24-year-old Spaniard looked off-balance and overpowered, and managed to win only three games.
“Every Grand Slam is really difficult, the first rounds,” Kerber, 30, said after her match. “Wimbledon is really special. You need to find your rhythm. It’s also quite mental. There are a lot of things that have to come together. It is always tough to play against someone you actually don’t know and also don’t know how she is playing.”
In the opening set, Liu broke the powerful lefty three times and won four games in a row to take the set, but Kerber rallied to win the second. In the third, which saw five straight breaks of serve, Kerber was unable to hide her frustration; she whacked her racket against the turf, turned away from Liu to collect herself before receiving her serve and belted out loudly in a mix of German and English — “Komm schon! Yes!” — several times after winning a big point.
At three-all in the third, Kerber held serve for only the second time in the set and didn’t drop a single point to go ahead 5-3. To Liu’s credit, she never showed nerves. In fact, as she returned from a second bathroom break to serve to remain in the game, she looked as if she expected to win. It didn’t matter that she had never beaten a top-10 opponent or that she was the lowest-ranked and youngest player remaining in the tournament.
Anyone who parachuted into that moment would have had no idea Liu, a first-generation Chinese-American from Thousand Oaks, California, was but a year removed from becoming the first American since 1992 to win the Wimbledon juniors title. She was poised, collected and played beyond her years. She saved match point and took the next two points to force Kerber to serve for the match.
“I was thinking about every single point when I was serving for the match,” Kerber said. “I was just trying to not think about the breaks before, just about my serve, how well I can serve, playing point by point. That was the key at the end of the match for me.”
Indeed, Kerber won the final three points by delivering three unreturnable serves. Experience won the day. Until it didn’t.
Muguruza fought back from 2-4 to take the first set in her match 7-5, but ultimately couldn’t fend off Van Uytvanck’s aggressive attack. She was broken seven times and, at one point in the third set, slipped hard enough sprinting down a ball at the net that fans wondered if she would need a medical timeout.
“She played big today. She took a lot of risk, and it worked for her,” Muguruza said of Van Uytvanck after the match. “I also think that my level today was not where I wanted it to be. That’s why she could develop that kind of level. She was playing really good, so it was a little bit tough for me, to have an opponent that is having a great day, and the match is slipping out of your hands.”
Muguruza, who said she came into this tournament not attempting to defend her title but “to win it again,” will unfortunately not have that chance. But Kerber, the 2016 Australian Open and US Open champ — and a 2016 Wimbledon finalist — is experiencing a resurgence this year that can only be buoyed by her second-round survival.
“It was a tricky match. I was not playing my best,” Kerber said. “I was not feeling my rhythm from the beginning. I’m just happy that I won it at the end.”
After a disappointing 2017 in which she won no events and didn’t advance past the fourth round at a single Slam, Kerber made a coaching change and opened her season with a win in Sydney. She earned a trip to the Australian Open semifinals in Melbourne in January and the quarters in Paris last month, and she lost a tight match against world No. 2 Caroline Wozniacki in the semis at Eastbourne last week. She is back in the top 10 internationally and, with this win, the No. 11 seed is now the fifth-highest seed remaining in the draw.
Only world No. 1 Simona Halep remains of the top five in the tournament. She is on Kerber’s side of the draw, but the two would not meet until the semis. That means Kerber’s chances of continuing her pattern of playing into the second week at Slams is as good a bet as any worth taking over the next 10 days. But the way this tournament is going, that promise isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.