“I love Bianca; I think she’s a great girl, but I think this is the worst match I played all tournament,” Williams said. “It’s hard to know you could do better.”
Williams, who was also complimentary of Andreescu’s game and mentality, has shown remarkable drive and resilience in her comeback to the tour after giving birth to a daughter, Olympia, in September 2017.
She is back in the top 10, back in contention for tennis’s biggest prizes. But for a proud champion who has had long stretches of dominance and has won 23 major singles titles, only one result is cause for genuine celebration.
The bottom line for now: Williams has yet to win a tournament since her comeback and is 0-4 in major finals without managing to win a set in any of them.
She alluded to her struggles at the award ceremony as she thanked her team for being supportive in “the ups and downs and downs and downs and downs and downs and downs.”
“Hopefully,” she added, “we’ll have some ups soon.”
Andreescu has had no shortage of ups and downs in her short career. Her rise has been astonishingly swift. She lost in the first round of qualifying at the U.S. Open the last two years and was ranked outside the top 150 when the season began.
But she has long believed that tennis greatness awaited her. After winning the prestigious Orange Bowl junior title for the second time in 2015 at age 15, she wrote herself a mock check as if she were champion of the U.S. Open and then updated it each year, with the new prize money total.
“Every year,” she said.
But she has been prone to injury, including back problems, and said earlier this season that she had weaknesses in her core that needed to be addressed. After deciding last year with her new coach, Sylvain Bruneau, to focus more on using the full range of her shotmaking and tactics, she broke through in earnest this March by winning the prestigious hardcourt tournament, the BNP Paribas Open, in Indian Wells, Calif.
But she then was forced to miss nearly all the clay-court season and miss all the grass-court season with a torn rotator cuff. Since returning to the tour last month, she has resumed dominating her elders.
Andreescu is 8-0 against top 10 players this year and has not lost a completed match since March 1. She has prevailed twice against Williams in the last month: winning the Rogers Cup in Toronto when Williams retired with a back problem in the final after just four games and defeating Williams on Saturday in the biggest stadium in tennis.
The sellout crowd pulled hard for Williams and occasionally applauded Andreescu’s errors and missed serves, prompting the British chair umpire Alison Hughes to turn “Please” into a mantra as she tried to keep the crowd under control.
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