MELBOURNE: Emma Raducanu tried to ask the questions, she threw in the extra ball and attempted to force the extra step from her opponent, but the world No.2 Iga Swiatek had all the answers and then some more in their Australian Open third-round clash on Rod Laver Arena.
“For sure I felt great,” Swiatek said after her 6-1, 6-0 win. “I felt like the ball was listening to me. I felt like all the tactics and everything I wanted to do, I was able to. So I just kept going.”
Swiatek, a five-time major winner, who will play German lucky loser Eva Lys in the fourth round on Monday, expanded on what exactly she meant by ‘the ball listening to her’, not that she needed to draw it out given that she had 24 winners and only 12 unforced errors in the 70-minute affair.
“I feel like that on a practice court most of the time,” she said. “Sometimes during matches I feel like I’m more precise and actually know where the ball is going to go. On the practice court at home, I feel it all the time, but I'm used to the court, I like the conditions and everything.”
Swiatek, who has never been past the semi-finals at Melbourne Park, is beginning to feel at home on these courts.
“Sometimes you need to get through some matches where you totally don’t know where the ball is going to land,” the 23-year-old said. “Every day is different, you have to work to get these feelings, not expect that you're going to get them because it's not so easy.”
The thing about a Raducanu-Swiatek contest is that the Briton’s game plays right into the Pole’s striking range, and every time Raducanu, the 2021 US Open champion, tried to push the world No.2 simply accelerated, she reached and swung.
Swiatek, who bowed out in the third round here last year, said she was in a whole different place this time.
“Last year was the toughest Australian Open I have ever had,” she said. “The draw was pretty unlucky for me, still, if you play well, you're able to get through that. I was tight, I didn't move well. Now I feel much more fresh. I feel like everything is in the right spot and working. I can just focus on the game, and that's it.”
