The grass court awakening of Iga Swiatek has been quite something this summer. Think of this as the game-changing Fortnight when the Pole – who defeated Belinda Bencic for the loss of just two games to reach her first Wimbledon final – dropped all the awkwardness and unease and realised she can actually play well on the lawns.
Even Swiatek’s air-shots seemed to have purpose on the day she beat Bencic 6-2, 6-0 to go through to play Amanda Anisimova for the Venus Rosewater Dish on Saturday. Almost any moment she had, the former world No.1 was energetically swishing her racket through the hot air of Centre Court, and then she did it for real. When the ball was in play, she was similarly relentless, and it was all too much for Bencic, her unseeded opponent from Switzerland.
Perhaps more than another player, Swiatek adores her routines and as always she had
listened to AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and the Rolling Stones before going out to play,
but what followed was something fresh and novel that she hadn’t experienced before
at The Championships: feeling good on a grass court.
“Honestly, I never even dreamt that it was going to be possible for me to play in the final, so I’m just super excited and just proud of myself,” she said. “Every point is different and every match I need to adjust my game but for sure I feel like I improved my movement and I’m serving really well and I feel really confident, so I’m just going for it and it’s working so I will keep doing that.
“Tennis keeps surprising me,” she added. “I thought I had lived through everything, even though I’m young. I thought I'd experienced everything on the court. I didn’t experience playing well on grass so that’s the first time and I’m super excited and enjoying it.”
Swiatek has an analytical brain. Hence the love of crosswords between matches. But the greatest puzzle she has ever solved, the one she had found more cryptic than any other, was finding a way to excel at the All England Club. When the Fortnight began, Swiatek had never gone beyond the quarter-finals at The Championships, which made it her least successful Grand Slam.
Swiatek’s the greatest clay court player of her generation, which is why she has already won four Roland-Garros titles, and she has also been the champion on the hard courts of the US Open. Now, only Anisimova stands between Swiatek and becoming the Wimbledon champion.
Like Swiatek, Anisimova is also through to a first Wimbledon final. “She must be playing great. With her game style, the surface fits her,” Swiatek said of the American. Commenting on Anisimova taking a break for her mental health and then coming back and playing this level of tennis, Swiatek said: “Anyone who struggles and then gets back deserves a lot of respect.”
It’s been over a year since Swiatek won a title on any surface, going back to her victory at Roland-Garros last season, but why not surprise us all, as well as herself, by ending that empty period on the Wimbledon grass?
This summer, Swiatek has been putting a new twist on the summer grass court swing. She’s been introducing people to a new way of eating Wimbledon strawberries – with pasta – and she has been showing a new side of herself as someone comfortable on grass.
Before Wimbledon, she reached a first Tour-level final on grass, at a tournament in Bad Homburg in Germany, and now she is into another, where victory would take her three-quarters of the way to a Career Grand Slam.
Here, on a baking Centre Court, was a meeting of two former girls’ singles champion. You might wonder why it has taken so long - Bencic is 28 years old and Swiatek 24 – for them to play in the semi-finals of the ladies’ singles. But success as a junior doesn’t mean you will instantly be a force as a woman on the lawns.
Maybe what has changed for Swiatek this summer has been that she has been talking to the Slazenger balls and – wonderfully – they have been listening to her words of encouragement and instruction.
But for a delay in the opening set – when a spectator was taken ill and needed medical assistance – this semi-final could have been completed inside an hour. Few inside Centre Court would have taken any pleasure seeing a bagel set in a Wimbledon semi-final. But there was no stopping Swiatek.