No. 5 Match of '23: Iga Swiatek wins third Roland Garros title the hard way over Muchova

Tennis Channel will re-air this match on December 10 at 7 P.M. ET.

At Roland Garros, Iga Swiatek went to a place she had never been before in a Grand Slam final: a third set.

She didn’t seem to like it there. As it began, she banged her palm against her head, railed at her player box, and gave her coaches a sarcastic thumb’s up after a wild ground-stroke error. How that shot was their fault wasn’t clear, but tennis players don’t tend to act rationally when they feel a major title slipping through their fingers.

Especially players who are accustomed to total dominance in these matches. Of the 13 finals Swiatek had won coming into Paris this year, 12 had been in straight sets, and most of those were blowouts. After a set and a half at Roland Garros, she was blowing out Karolina Muchova, too. Swiatek had a 6-2, 3-0 lead over an opponent who was playing her first match of this magnitude. Swiatek hadn’t needed to do anything special to get there. She played solid, consistent tennis, and Muchova, pressing, tried to do too much, and missed too often.

But there’s a danger in playing safely and letting your opponent implode: What do you do if she stops imploding? When Muchova finally relaxed and began to find the corners with her forehand in the second set, Swiatek tried to shift gears with her and take the initiative back, but she couldn’t do it. Ground strokes that normally go for winners went for errors instead. She double-faulted and was broken at 4-4, and missed an easy forehand to be broken at 5-5. She lost the first eight points of the third set, and trailed 0-2. Now it was Muchova who defining the play with her smooth, forward-moving attack.

Did Swiatek have what it took to rescue herself? In a few of her losses in 2023, she had fallen behind and failed to fight back.

This time she found an answer. With Muchova serving at 2-1 in the third set, she cracked two straight down-the-line backhand passing shot winners. The confidence was back in her swings, and the squandered second set behind her. From there, the Pole and the Czech raced through the next four games on even terms, as the title hung in the balance.

Muchova peaked one game too soon. At 4-4, she reached break point, but Swiatek dug out a difficult backhand and won that point, held with two first serves, and came out firing on her first return point at 5-4. It was finally too much for Muchova, who made two forehand errors and double faulted at match point.

“In the third set I didn’t want to have any regrets about the second,” Swiatek said. “I just kind of looked forward, and I said to myself, ‘OK, you know what? I’m just going to give it all.’ No thinking, no like, analyzing. Just play my game, use my intuition.

When the match was over, Swiatek bent down to the court in tears: She had done it the hard way this time.