Each player broke serve 10 times during the contest.
The WTA version of this year’s National Bank Open was nearly washed away in the Montreal rain. After days of painful waiting and little play, the tournament was forced to jam the last three rounds of the bottom half into the final weekend. The end result left something to be desired: In the final, Liudmila Samsonova, who was playing her second match of the day, mustered just one game against Jessica Pegula.
But for fans who could stay up late enough, there was one silver lining to the week: Elena Rybakina and Daria Kasatkina defied the scheduling, and their exhaustion, to stage a colossal, post-midnight, quarterfinal tug-of-war. It lasted three hours and 27 minutes and ended at 2:55 A.M., when Rybakina snapped off a winning smash on her fifth match point.
There was much more to this contest than just its length and its early-morning finish. From the start, the two women presented an entertaining stylistic contrast. The taller Rybakina hit with flat depth and forced the action from the baseline. The undersized Kasatkina stepped back, sprinted from sideline to sideline, and counter-punched by creatively redirecting the ball with sharp crosscourt angles and surprising down-the-line attacks. The rallies were long, but the dynamic between the two players was never dull.
Kasatkina won a grinding first set, served for the match at 5-4 in the second set, and led 30-15. Unfortunately for her, Rybakina chose that moment to lock down her ground strokes. She broke with a big backhand and a bigger forehand. She broke again to win the second set. She jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the third.
“Those legs have run some miles,” commentator Robbie Koenig said of Kasatkina, who was finally unable to track down a Rybakina drop shot.
But her legs weren’t finished running. Kasatkina reeled off the next four games to lead 4-3. By this time, the two players looked like punch-drunk fighters: Neither could deliver a knockout blow, but neither stayed down on the mat for long.
Kasatkina served for the match again at 6-5, but double faulted at break point. Rybakina went up 6-3 in the deciding tiebreaker, but Kasatkina saved all three match points, the last one with a looping topspin forehand return that touched down in the corner for a winner that elicited a roar of approval, and shock, from the small but vocal Montreal crowd still in attendance. On Rybakina’s fourth match point, Kasatkina did the same thing, and elicited the same roar, with a dipping forehand pass.
Kasatkina finally earned a match point of her own, at 8-7, only to see it wiped away with a Rybakina service winner. Two points laster, at 9-8, Rybakina forced her way forward, and closed out this marathon with a bullet overhead. Kasatkina could only run so far, so fast.
Rybakina, per her tradition, didn’t celebrate the victory. In this case, there was little time to revel, as she was scheduled to play her semifinal that same afternoon. More rain postponed it until the next day, but she still couldn’t recover in time to beat Samsonova.
“I feel destroyed,” Rybakina said, “just because of the scheduling and the situation.”
All the more reason to be impressed by the performance these women put on anyway.
