Australian Open recap: Double bounce causes unforced officiating error, Svitolina shows spirit

The Athletic

Welcome to the Australian Open briefing, where will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.

On day 11, the quarterfinals wrapped up. Aryna Sabalenka, Paula Badosa, Iga Swiatek and Madison Keys are the WTA final four; Jannik Sinner, Ben Shelton, Novak Djokovic and Alexander Zverev the ATP’s quartet.

Here are some of their storylines.

What Tommy Paul needs to do next

For two sets and more than two hours, Tommy Paul outplayed Zverev in their Australian Open quarterfinal on Tuesday.

The American world No. 11, who will be world No. 9 when the tournament is over, still found himself two sets to love down. He lost both of them in tiebreaks, having had the chance to win both on his serve.

Zverev, the world No. 2, was more solid in the moments that mattered, having been fairly anonymous in everything that led up to them. Paul has now played 10 matches against top-20 players at tennis’ four majors, winning just one (against then-No. 20 Grigor Dimitrov at the 2020 Australian Open). When Paul made the semifinals here in Melbourne two years ago, the highest-ranked player he faced was Roberto Bautista Agut, the world No. 25 at the time.

Paul is a fine athlete, and is blessed with an equally fine array of shots. Against Zverev, he showed off on both counts until he was ahead, before withdrawing into himself and making errors, or strange decisions. When he was trailing or level, he was at times unplayable. The outrageous flicked backhand to save match point when down 5-0 in the fourth set, with the quarterfinal effectively over, exemplified the problem.

At the business end of the first two sets, he could barely keep the ball in the court.

“I just have to close those sets out,” Paul said in a post-match news conference. “That’s what the top players do so well. When they’re front-running, they do a great job in closing big sets or any sets, and that’s what I didn’t do well today.

“Then, when we got to the breakers, he obviously dominated the breakers. I made way too many unforced errors, and he locked it down. He did what he does, and he played great breakers.”

For Paul, 27, solving his big-match problem at the Grand Slams is the next step in his development.

Another day of officiating ignominy for tennis

Wednesday was another tough day for the sport’s inconsistent relationship with technology and sensible rules.

The moment at issue occurred in the fifth game of the second set of Swiatek’s win against Emma Navarro.

Navarro feathered a perfect drop shot that Swiatek rushed to catch up with. She swatted her racket at the ball and got it over the net, in what turned out to be a pretty good drop-shot back.

Navarro sprinted for that one but couldn’t get to it. When she finished her effort, she immediately looked to the umpire, enquiring about whether the ball had bounced twice on Swiatek’s side. They called the ball up, but Navarro could not ask for a video review (VR).

Players have to stop a point as soon as an incident happens, under the rules of VR, rather than finishing off the point and then going back to review the footage, as happens in soccer when officials allow a goal to be scored before raising the offside flag to rule it out.

Later, Lorenzo Sonego did exactly that in his four-set defeat to Shelton, and was awarded the point after the replay showed a double bounce.

In the earlier women’s match, the incident occurred on game point for Swiatek. As the players sat down at the side of the court, a replay of the shot was shown on screens in the stadium and fans’ homes around the world. There was a clear double bounce that could not be corrected. Navarro would not win a game the rest of the match, as Swiatek advanced 6-1, 6-2.

“We should be allowed to see after the point, even if you play,” she said. “It happened so fast. You hit the shot, and she hits it back, and you’re just, like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m playing’.

“In the back of your head you’re like, ‘OK, maybe I can still win the point even though it wasn’t called. It’s going to be a downer if I stop the point and it turns out it wasn’t a double bounce’. It’s tough.”

Swiatek said she didn’t look at the replay when it appeared in the stadium, because she wanted to stay focused on the next point: “I wasn’t sure if it was a double bounce or I hit it with my frame. It was hard to say because I was full sprinting. I don’t remember even seeing the contact point. I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t really look when you hit the ball.”

She said she was waiting for a video review and then learned it wasn’t coming because of the rule about stopping midpoint.

Instead, tennis found itself in yet another situation where the whole world knows a call is bad, but the three people who need that information the most — and sooner than anybody else — cannot use it.

Elina Svitolina makes another stirring Grand Slam run

Only four months ago, a “very, very nervous” Elina Svitolina was preparing to have surgery to insert two screws into one of her ankles.

At that point, the 30-year-old really wasn’t sure how her body would respond and when she’d be able to return to top-level tennis.

Turns out she has quickly gotten back to her best, making it all the way to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open in her first tournament since the U.S. Open at the end of last summer, at which she was in constant pain.

Keys ended Svitolina’s run in Melbourne in a tight three-set match, but she’s taken a lot of encouragement from how quickly she’s been able to compete at such a high level again. The extra aggression she has been playing with could help her get over her Grand Slam last-four hump this year. She has lost three semifinals in majors, most recently at Wimbledon in 2023.

Svitolina is an engaging personality and has spoken openly about the challenge of carrying on with her career while a war continues to be fought in her home country of Ukraine.

After beating Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova in the fourth round here, she wrote “the spirit of Ukraine,” accompanied by a love heart, on the courtside camera’s lens. Then in the interview room, she added: “To wake up to the news of when your friends die on the front line, having been killed by a Russian soldier, it’s something that’s really, really heavy on my heart.”

Svitolina has won all seven of her matches against Russian players since the war began three years ago.

It was an uplifting tournament too for her husband Gael Monfils, who also reached the second week in the men’s event. They will have plenty of stories from Melbourne 2025 to share with their two-year-old daughter, Skai.

Shots of the days

First Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic…

… and then, for the millionth time this tournament it seems like, Sonego:

Australian Open men’s draw 2025

Australian Open women’s draw 2025

Tell us what you noticed during the last-eight matches in Melbourne in the comments section below.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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