The Top Matches of 2016, No. 7: Kerber d. Serena (Australian Open)

At the start of the highlight clip above, Angelique Kerber walks into Rod Laver Arena for the final of the Australian Open and looks a little surprised to be handed a bouquet of flowers. Can you tell that this was the 28-year-old’s first Grand Slam final after nearly a decade on tour?

It was hard to imagine that Kerber’s opponent, Serena Williams, could be surprised by anything on a tennis court. That evening in Melbourne, Williams was playing her 26th major final; her first had come all the way back in the last century, at the 1999 U.S. Open. She won that match at Flushing Meadows, and went on to win 20 more Slam finals against just four defeats. Coming into this one, Serena was 5-1 against the seventh-seeded German. There seemed to be little chance that she wouldn’t make it 6-1 and tie Kerber’s countrywoman, Steffi Graf, with 22 major titles.

This time, though, Serena was in for a surprise. Kerber’s 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 win set a new tone for the WTA in 2016, and helped Kerber vault all the way from No. 7 to No. 1 by year’s end.

Here’s a look at the highlights above. Eleven months later, the rallies, as well as the atmosphere in Laver, feel more intense to me than they did that day.

—Serena got off to a slow start, missing mid-court shots that she would normally put away. While she would find her range as the match progressed, the putaways proved to be a problem throughout. Unable to belt the ball past the speedy Kerber, Serena found herself trying to finish points at the net much more often than usual. That was part of her game plan with coach Patrick Mouratoglou, but it didn’t work; Serena won just 15 of 32 points at net. She also made just 53 percent of her first serves, and won a surprisingly low 69 percent of those points. Kerber, not known for her service prowess, won 73 percent of her first-serve points.

In her six previous matches, Serena hadn’t dropped a set. She had lost just five games to Maria Sharapova in the quarterfinals and four to Agnieszka Radwanska in the semis. Did she peak too soon? Her best tennis had come against the fifth-seeded Sharapova, who was her opponent in the Aussie Open final the previous year. Serena never reached that level in this final.

—Kerber said that before the year began, she and coach Torben Beltz worked on getting her to be more aggressive. That was certainly part of her rise to No. 1. In this match, though, it wasn’t all-out aggression that helped Kerber. Most of the time she chased Serena’s shots, and the biggest difference between the two players was the number of unforced errors each committed—Serena had 46, while Kerber made just 13. It was Kerber’s counter-punching, in the form of her brilliant passing shots, that won her this match, not her first-strike abilities.

Still, you can see that Kerber had an offensive plan as well, and that she executed it with control and margin. Twice in this clip she slides her serve to Serena’s backhand, goes back in that direction with a crosscourt forehand and finishes the point with a crosscourt backhand to the other corner. When Kerber does play defense, she’s able to angle the ball enough that Serena is often forced to hit from outside the sidelines. That gave Kerber more room to follow up with a passing shot.

—When Serena won the second set and punctuated it with a “Come on!” it seemed that the party was over for Kerber. Now, surely, Serena would raise her game and Kerber would be satisfied with second place. Something like that would happen when these two met in the Wimbledon final five months later. On Centre Court, Kerber would fight Serena to a draw for the first 10 games of the opening set, only to lose control of her highly-controlled game over the last two and never recover.

In Oz, though, it was Serena who faltered and Kerber who found the holes in her game. While she came up with an all-important backhand drop-shot winner on a big point in the third, it was the German’s passes—here we see two forehands down the line and an even better one crosscourt—that won her this Slam. As much as Kerber tries to be more aggressive, counter-punching will always come more naturally to her. Serena’s net attack also helped Kerber keep her cool at a time when most of the world believed she would lose it. When Serena is pounding a shot and following it forward, you don’t have time to get nervous.

“I was missing a lot off the ground, coming to the net,” Serena said in a concise recap of the match. “She kept hitting some great shots every time I came in. I think I kept picking the wrong shots coming into it.”

“[I] had one leg on the plane to Germany,” said Kerber, who saved a match point in her first-round match against Misaki Doi. “I take my chance to be here in the final and play against Serena. My dream came true tonight, on this night. My whole life I was working so hard, and now I can say that I’m a Grand Slam champion. It sounds so crazy.”

It doesn’t sound nearly as crazy now.