Staring down double match point as the rhythmic clapping of the Centre Court crowd echoed in her ears, Sabine Lisicki needed no luck from the gold horseshoe around her neck. The 62nd-ranked wild card pulled out the hammer and banged four ferocious, unreturnable serves in succession. That stirring service display sparked a spirited comeback, as Lisicki slammed 17 aces to dispatch French Open champion Li Na, 3-6, 6-4, 8-6, and roar into the third round of Wimbledon. The 21-year-old racked up her ninth consecutive grass-court win in returning to SW19 for the first time since she reached the 2009 quarterfinals.
An ankle injury limited Lisicki to 10 tournaments in 2010 and caused her ranking to plummet to No. 218 in March, but she has resurrected her career this season. Injuries betrayed Lisicki in recent majors—she was wheeled off the court at the 2010 U.S. Open in a wheelchair and carried off the court on a stretcher last month at Roland Garros—but she was flying high today. When Li’s down-the-line forehand strayed wide on Lisicki's third match point, the German dropped to her knees and shed tears of joy after registering her greatest Grand Slam victory. “My emotions are over the moon; it’s just amazing,” Lisicki told the BBC after beating Li for the second time in the past three months.
The third-seeded Li had won 14 of 15 matches at majors this year and withstood a three-ace fourth game from Lisicki to take the first set. But Li lost the circularity of her swing on the forehand side and began to hit that stroke a bit too flat, flirting with the net too much. Shaking her head in frustration after forehand misses and stretching in vain as Lisicki’s serves blurred by her—and apparently banishing her husband from the box in the second set, all the while—Li found herself playing catch-up.
Serving for the second set at 5-3, Lisicki tightened up, and when her inside-out forehand floated wide, Li broke back for 4-5. At deuce the next game, Li struck a backhand that landed on the sideline and would have given her game point, but the shot was called out. Li successfully challenged, but couldn’t shake its ramifications—after another error, Lisicki broke back to end a nine-and-a-half minute game and seize the second set.
The match’s turning point came at 3-5 in the final set, when Lisicki unleashed a series of serves that recalled Brenda Schultz-McCarthy at her finest: Two service winners saved match points, followed by successive aces of 124 mph and 122 mph to hold for 4-5. A rattled Li netted a forehand as Lisicki broke back with a committed “come on!” for 5-5. Li showed her competitive character in breaking back for 6-5, only to see her forehand fail her again, as she could not convert her second chance to serve it out.
Lisicki's injury made the prospect of watching the 2010 Wimbledon too painful for her—she reflexively reached for the remote whenever she stumbled across tennis on TV last year. “It was a very tough time for me. Even walking, in the beginning, was tough,” Lisicki recalls. “I had zero muscles in my calf so I had to rebuild them and basically had to learn how to walk and run again.”
The run continues with a third-round clash against Misaki Doi.
—Richard Pagliaro