THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — A few months ago, it seemed pretty clear that the dominant characters of the past few years in women’s tennis were still on their thrones.
Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Elena Rybakina and Coco Gauff had won the past four Grand Slams. Sabalenka had swept the Sunshine Double of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif. and the Miami Open.
The world No. 1 beat Rybakina in the Indian Wells final. She beat Gauff in the Miami final. Both matches went three sets and turned on just a couple of points. As the hard courts gave way to clay and then grass, Gauff and Świątek, the defending French Open and Wimbledon champions, were waiting for Sabalenka, still hunting an organic major title, and Rybakina, who had surged through the first months of the year to have a realistic shot at grabbing the world No. 1 ranking, to snap at their heels.
Someone appears to have forgotten to give that memo to the rest of tennis.
Three months later, as women’s tennis swings round to hard courts again, it also has two new Grand Slam champions, who land as relative newcomers to casual fans, even though they have far more experience and pedigree than their ages might suggest.
Linda Nosková, 21, captured the Wimbledon title five weeks after Mirra Andreeva, 19, won the French Open.
Nosková and Andreeva were too good not to win a major title before long. Nosková, from the Czech Republic, broke into the top 40 in 2023 and has risen steadily ever since; Andreeva announced herself to the tour when she was just 15 and won two WTA 1000 titles, the rung below the Grand Slams, last year. For a time, she was the only teenager in the top 100, an inversion of the recent past in women’s tennis.
They are also useful foils for understanding the way their games propelled them to those titles. They both have a killer serve — Nosková’s is a true buzzsaw — which is more important for winning at the highest level than it used to be. Nosková’s groundstrokes are similarly incisive, while Andreeva’s are more probing, though she can crack her backhand down the line as well as just about anyone.
Most importantly, they both play multi-dimensional tennis. Nosková’s drop shots, slices and low, quick steps are just as crucial as her more powerful weapons. Andreeva’s defense and touch are just as crucial as her serve. And players up and down the tour who want to succeed — and in some cases, have already done just about everything there is to do in tennis — are embracing this line of thinking.
Świątek has sought to emphasize the controlled part of the controlled aggressiveness that made her an all-conquering world No. 1; Sabalenka has added deftness and dexterity to what was an all-power game. Pure baseline power can still run hot, but point-and-shoot tennis has less room for error if groundstrokes start to spray. Having tools to lean on when plan A is not working is now a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Questions remain. One is whether all this can hold up. After her loss at Wimbledon to an inspired Naomi Osaka, who embraced the movement required to succeed on grass as she never had this year, Sabalenka told the BBC: “Let’s see if they can do it consistently.”
She could have added, “and on hard courts” and been on solid ground.
The other is whether one of those style evolutions that happens in sports every so often, when one approach proves more effective than another, is truly underway — or whether the characteristics of clay and grass exaggerate the advantages of one and blunt those of another. Additionally, neither Nosková nor Andreeva had to defeat one of the established four on the way to their titles — but that was because they either lost earlier than expected, or just were on the other side of the draw.
The answer is likely somewhere in between. Świątek and Serena Williams, 44, are the only active women’s players to win a Grand Slam singles tournament on all three surfaces. Gauff’s Wimbledon semifinal run suggested that she is finding her way on grass after two years in the wilderness. It’s entirely possible that the established power quartet could reign supreme from the start of the summer hard-court swing, all the way to early spring next year.
And yet, there is a growing sense that big serves and big forehands can only take a player so far — in part because the players steeped in court craft who have succeeded these past months have largely done so by emphasizing those factors, adding steel and reliability to their core shots so that their palette of variety has a consistent canvas.
Marta Kostyuk used a similar approach to win two consecutive tournaments and 16 straight matches on clay before she lost to Andreeva in the French Open semifinals. Iva Jović, just 18 and already the world No. 16, has a controlled aggressiveness and fleet-footed movement that calls Świątek to mind.
Then there is 29-year-old Karolína Muchová, Noskova’s Czech compatriot. A master of the all-court, multifaceted approach to winning matches, she is putting together the best season of her career, in part by reminding herself to do the basics well. Creativity disguised by power can carry a player very far these days. As Muchová experienced on Centre Court against her friend, it’s a very hard thing to defuse.
“I really couldn’t read where she’s going to serve, and it made it really tough for me,” Muchová said in her news conference after losing to Nosková in three sets. “She’s a calm fighter. She’ll go after every point, she fights for every point, so she’s really competitive. It’s definitely tough to play her on any surface.”
Still, when Nosková did start to slide with the finishing line in sight, up 6-2, 5-2, it was the power that went first. She caught forehands straight after her serve late. She sprayed double faults. She stopped trusting her balls down-the-line and defaulted to safer, crosscourt shots that Muchová could latch on to and attack.
After frittering five championship points, losing five consecutive games and the second set in the process, Nosková left the court. She knew she had to reset. She and her coach had game-planned for such a scenario — if not one quite as extreme as this, she said.
On her walk off Centre Court, she saw the Venus Rosewater Dish and the silver plate awarded to the runner-up. She wanted the bigger one. So she played for it.
“I started over,” Nosková said of how she went playing all different sorts of balls, especially her forehand down the line, attacking Muchová’s backhand.
Often, she could have hit them harder. She didn’t have to. Lately, at least, there’s been another way.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
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