By Chris Oddo | Friday July 7, 2017
Ana Konjuh is back at Wimbledon and this time without the heartbreak after reaching the second week for the first time.
Photo Source: Shaun Botterill
She may be the youngest player remaining in the Wimbledon draw, but 19-year-old Ana Konjuh has plenty of Grand Slam experience—both good and bad—under her belt.
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Konjuh reached the third round of Wimbledon as a 16-year-old and also earned a berth in the U.S. open quarterfinal last season, proving that she is not only a promising youngster, she’s a big-match player.
But one of Konta’s more memorable experiences at the Grand Slam level and at Wimbledon occurred last year when she slipped on a tennis ball and badly sprained her ankle at 7-7 in the third set of her second-round match with Agnieszka Radwanska. She would end up losing, despite the fact that she served for the victory twice and had three match points.
Her response was to bounce back and clobber Radwanska at the U.S. Open to reach her first Grand Slam quarterfinal last September. So much for some bad luck keeping this kid down.
This year Konjuh is back at Wimbledon and proving once again that grass may be her best surface. It doesn’t necessarily make sense because she has a really big backswing on her powerful forehand but she’s a deceptively good mover on the surface and the flatness and low net clearance of her ground strokes are great at taking time away from her opponents.
Konjuh’s power was on full display today as she rallied to take out No.8-seeded Dominika Cibulkova, 7-6(3), 3-6, 6-4, to book a spot alongside either Venus Williams or Naomi Osaka in the round of 16.
Konjuh calmly rallied from 5-1 down in the opening set to take Cibulkova in a breaker, and despite dropping the second set, she was dominant at two crucial junctures of the match—from 5-1 down all the way through the first-set tiebreaker, and early in the third set—and absolutely took the play at Cibulkova. The power of her shots, and the heaviness of them, make her a lethal force from the baseline. Cibulkova’s second-serve is weak, and Konjuh brutally punished it, hitting on 62 percent of her second-serve return points to help create 16 break points in the match.
She finished with 54 winners against 47 unforced—and Ostapenkian statline if there ever was one—which makes us want to ask the question: Is Ana Konjuh capable of tearing through the draw at Wimbledon the way that Ostapenko did at Roland Garros?
The way she’s hitting the ball it certainly seems a fair question.