On Saturday, 20-year Sara Bejlek won her biggest title–by far. She had just slipped out of the top 100, so after qualifying for the main draw in Abu Dhabi, she charged past the likes of Jelena Ostapenko and Clara Tauson, then secured the trophy with a 7-6, 6-1 win over almost-top-tenner Ekaterina Alexandrova.
It’s tough to overstate just how out of the blue this was for the Czech. By ranking, Ostapenko, Tauson, and Alexandrova represent three of her four highest-ranked victories. Her two other main-draw victims, Sonay Kartal and Ashlyn Krueger, also count among her top ten. And she beat Kartal 6-0, 6-2.
That’s a big-hitting set of opponents. Bejlek, by contrast, lacks the power weapons that are becoming standard on the WTA tour. As a left-hander, she practically begs us to call her “crafty.” One upset against that group is plausible enough: After all, Ostapenko’s low-percentage tennis invites chalk-defying outcomes. But so many?
The final
I don’t pretend to be an expert on the Czech’s game. She has only a couple dozen tour-level matches under her belt, so she’s a newcomer for most of us. That said, we now have a detailed match chart from Saturday’s final that offers some clues as to how Bejlek battled the barrage of ball-bashers in Bahrain Abu Dhabi.
The conditions helped. It was windy, and the conditions were slow. None of that favored Alexandrova, who likes predictable balls she can smack flat back across the net. The court speed not only made it difficult for Alexandrova to hit through the court, it gave her a little less pace to work with on Bejlek’s own balls. Surely the Russian must have wished she had played indoors in Ostrava(!!!) instead.
The lefty’s game plan seized on those advantages. She looped balls back down the middle. She sliced more than she had to, refusing to give her opponent a predictable bounce height. She mixed in some almost impossibly slow serves. She won the first point of the match with a dropshot-lob combo that, while she didn’t attempt many more, surely gave Alexandrova pause.
The central result was that the Russian just couldn’t hit winners. By my count, she ended with 13 winners against 37 unforced errors. Just as telling as the abysmal ratio was that the 13 winners represented less than 10% of total points. In her last 60 charted matches–going back to 2022–opponents have held her under 10% just six times. When they do, it’s usually because they take the racket out of her hands by playing hyper-aggressively themselves. Two of the opponents in question were Anisimova and Yastremska.
Bejlek, by contrast, gave Alexandrova ball after ball that looked like it should have been obliterated. In different conditions, or when the Russian was in better form, maybe the winner count would have been much higher. But from the first few games, it was clear that the Russian wasn’t confident in her ability to take control. Big, aggressive hitters usually have more influence on rally length than more passive opponents, but that wasn’t what happened on Saturday. The average point lasted 5.1 strokes, tied for third-longest among the nearly 100 charts we have from Alexandrova’s career.
Translated into tennis cliché: Bejlek let her opponent beat herself.
If we can extract one concrete skill from the Abu Dhabi final, it’s that Bejlek doesn’t let servers overpower her. 85% of Alexandrova’s serves came back, compared to a 52-week average of 75%. Again, we don’t have much data yet on Bejlek, but here’s another bit of evidence: In Madrid two years ago, she retrieved more than 80% of Rybakina’s serves. The Aussie Open champ is the toughest on tour to return, usually holding opponents to around 67%.
Despite all the frustrations and all the extra shots she had to hit, Alexandrova nearly pulled out the first-set tiebreak. She led 4-2 at the change of ends before getting dragged into a series of long rallies broken up only by a couple of well-executed short points from the Czech. Having dropped the 95-point slog that was the first frame, Alexandrova ran out of ideas. She simply watched the error count soar.
You don’t win slams by letting opponents beat themselves–marathon runners notwithstanding. But in the hands of someone persistent enough, it’s a game plan that can keep you in Bejlek’s new neighborhood of the top 40. With 500 points on the books from Abu Dhabi, the left-hander has the rest of the season to prove that she belongs.
When Bejlek beat Kartel and before Kartel won a game I thought it may have been the most dominate set and a half of tennis I’ve ever seen played.