Every professional on the tennis tour has his story. Magda Linette and Aryna Sabalenka, for example, advanced to the semi-finals in Melbourne on this warm Wednesday. For the Pole, her 6-3, 7-5 quarter-final victory over the Czech Karolina Pliskova has a completely different meaning than for the Belarusian, who prevailed 6-3, 6-2 against the Croatian Donna Vekic. At the ripe old age of 30, Linette is already happy with what she has on the credit side. Sabalenka thinks he is passing through.
Linette’s move is all the more surprising because Iga Swiatek, the world number one, would have been expected to represent Poland there. The two know each other, of course, but don’t have much to do with each other. Linette trains in the USA. She’s popular on the tour, she’s part of the Players Council, and many of her colleagues congratulated her on Twitter. It also became clear at her press conferences why Linette enjoys sympathy, she speaks about herself in an unaffected manner. So she admitted that her “emotional management” too often got in the way. She “took defeats personally”. In Melbourne they do it better. In fact, she played her solid game relatively matter-of-factly.
In balance: Aryna Sabalenka controlled her strength and temperament in the quarterfinals against Croatian Donna Vekic.
(Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP)
Sabalenka is contesting her fourth semi-final, both in Wimbledon (2021) and at the US Open (2021, 2022) the fifth in the world rankings missed the final. She was always too restless inside, she said. Sabalenka is just a temperamental person, she hits the balls so hard that they should demand compensation. The only problem: Too often she had done this too impetuously, especially with her serve she hit everything but the service field. In 2022 she recorded 428 double faults in 55 matches. In Melbourne she admitted she was too stubborn to adjust her movement, but by the end of the season she was “working with a biomechanic guy” who was helping. Her service isn’t completely stable, but she didn’t miss a single one in the first round, which was almost a sensation. It would be good for them now “to get almost a little boring on the pitch,” said Sabalenka. The sentence could have come from Linette, just with a different reference.