The Greek loses for the third time in a row in the first round in a slam, grabbing a sad record, as never before had anyone in the top 10 lost in the first round for three straight slams. Is it really a surprise though? The story of a tennis player as physically strong as mentally fragile.
By Bianca Mundo
Maria Sakkari cries during her press conference. Twenty-four hours after stating during an ‘interview that she considered herself “serene and regenerated” after several weeks spent in Greece training and “ready to take one match at a time in the slams,” and confident after the final she reached just few weeks earlier in Washington. Once again, she is on the list of “upsets” on the first day of a slam. If, in hindsight, the first round defeat in Paris against the resurgent and very talented Muchova, who would later reach the final, where she forced even the world No. 1 to do overtime, can be accepted, if a bad day at Wimbledon, where the match with Kostuyk was nonetheless exciting and uncertain until the end, can happen, in Monday’s defeat against Masarova, the world number 77 who had never made it beyond the second round in a slam, if two clues make a proof, one can start talking about a real crisis.
The fact that Sakkari is not the female equivalent of Nadal in terms of the temper is no surprise. The 22 lost semifinals and seven lost finals out of eight played in her career are evidence of how this girl from Athens often melts like snow in the sun at major moments. In front of the cameras, including the Netflix ones that followed her in 2022 on the journey that took her from the Indian Wells final to the very painful semifinal loss to Kreijcikova where she started as the favourite, she never concealed her vulnerability and her struggle to handle the pressure: “It’s like there are two little creatures inside my mind in perpetual conflict, I didn’t even feel like I was in me. I got there completely empty of any energy.” However, she seemed to accept defeat with philosophy (which comes as no surprise, given her homeland) declaring “you learn to lose. Unless you are Roger, Rafa or Novak, who are from another planet. All the rest of us, we will always lose more than we can win, considering that you play almost every week.”
If indeed the scheduling of the tour grants an opportunity for redemption almost on a weekly basis, the downside is the frenetic moving often from one country or continent to another that leaves no room for any period of reflection and seems to suck players into a vortex. Snowed under with one, two, three defeats in a row and the surface seems farther and farther to reach.
Sakkari, in last night’s press conference, finally seemed much more honest with herself, after the numerous press conferences and interviews in which she claimed to have gained enough experience to win a major title. That much-coveted major title, or the fact it’s still missing, has been held against her since she entered the top 10, considering that so far she has only once lifted a trophy in a minor event, Rabat 2019.
She tearfully admitted that the two defeats at Roland Garros and Wimbledon have been a constant thought and most importantly for the first time she confirmed that identifying the problem is the biggest hurdle, before any hypothetical solution. Thus, it is not a matter of an injury, a coach to be changed immediately as suggested by the keyboard warriors, the stench of cannabis she complained about to the umpire during the match. The issue appears to be in her own words “I can’t see where the problem is. She is very tall and served well, but if I had played 10/15% better than I did, I would have won the match. These are matches I have to win, and there have been too many this year that I have lost like this. I must do something, but I don’t know what. I’m putting all the effort I can, but I have no idea what I’m going to do next.”
Sakkari is thinking of taking a break from tennis, in the wake of a currently increasing and significant number of athletes like Andreescu, Anisimova, Muguruza and even multiple slam winners like Osaka, who in the last couple of years have expressed the same need, confirming that the muscle to be kept most trained in tennis, is the brain.
Not surprisingly, during the whole match with Masarova, she seemed almost absent. And there comes the echo of the words from her mother Angeliki, who is a tennis player as well and which do sound like a prophecy within the current events “Maria has sacrificed so much since she was a little girl. Only her inner demons or an injury could keep her off a tennis court. Because tennis players do not only lose to their opponents, but also to themselves.”
