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Serena and Bouchard finally set to meet at Australian Open, as Djokovic and Tsonga gear up for 2008 rematch

Roar Guru
15th January, 2019
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Roar Guru
15th January, 2019
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Five years after it was supposed to have happened, Serena Williams and Eugenie Bouchard will finally face off at the Australian Open on Thursday.

Williams entered the 2014 season off the back of a dominant 2013 which saw her claim 12 titles, including her second French Open title and fifth US Open title, over $12 million in prize money and reclaim the world number one ranking for the first time since October 2010.

Her bid for a sixth Australian Open title got off to the perfect start, successfully defending her Brisbane International title and then winning her first three matches at Melbourne Park without being forced to sweat.

But nobody would have forecast what was to happen when she faced Ana Ivanovic in the round of 16.

In four previous meetings, three of them at the US Open, Williams had won all eight sets and lost no more than four games in each set against the hapless Serb, who was coming off two consecutive years without winning a title and whose best was far beyond her.

When the American served an ace to start the match, it appeared she would be in for a short afternoon in the office.

True to form, she took the opening set 6-4 and well and truly had one foot in the quarter-finals.

But Ivanovic, who entered the match having ended Samantha Stosur’s title hopes in the previous round, started to raise her game and would not face another break point for the remainder of the match as she pulled off the tournament’s biggest upset, winning 4-6, 6-3, 6-3.

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That put her through to a quarter-final against young Canadian Eugenie Bouchard, which she would lose in three sets after being so close to winning in the second set.

What would transpire for the rest of the tournament – Li Na went on to win her first and only Australian Open title – would not have happened had Williams not taken her opponent so lightly.

The then-32-year-old would’ve started the hot favourite to defeat Bouchard in the quarter-finals, and been on her way to lifting the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Trophy for a sixth time.

She would eventually do so the following year, defeating Maria Sharapova in the final, before winning for the seventh time in 2017.

To the present now and, while Williams’ bid to attempt to match Margaret Court on 24 Grand Slam singles titles continues, Bouchard is continuing to fight her way back up the rankings. The Canadian has suffered a stunning rankings downfall no-one felt imaginable after she’d reached the final at Wimbledon aged 20 in 2014.

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Bouchard, who turns 25 next month, has not reached a Major quarter-final in four years and it is nearly five years since she won her lone career title in Nurnberger, in which she defeated Karolina Pliskova in the final.

She has, however, made an encouraging start to the new season, reaching the quarter-finals in Auckland where she fell to defending (and eventual) champion Julia Goerges after holding a match point in the third set.

Thus, nearly all tennis fans and experts are giving the former Wimbledon finalist little chance of beating Williams this Thursday.

However, what many people may not know is that Bouchard actually won their most recent meeting, during the round robin stage of the 2015 Hopman Cup. However, because that tournament does not distribute rankings points, nor is it a WTA-sanctioned event, it doesn’t count.

That match aside, Williams has won both of their official meetings, including by a pair of chopsticks at the 2014 WTA Finals.

The 37-year-old, on the other hand, went undefeated in her three singles matches at the Hopman Cup, losing only two games in a swift dismissal of Germany’s Tatjana Maria in her first match back at the Australian Open for two years.

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Following the match, she tweeted this, in a cheeky reference to when she won the 2017 title while secretly two months pregnant.

In another feature match scheduled for Thursday, Novak Djokovic will take a trip down memory lane when he faces off against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in a rematch of the 2008 final.

It was only eleven years ago that both men announced themselves to the tennis world, defeating Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in their respective semi-finals to set up an improbable Grand Slam final against each other.

Djokovic, then aged 20, hadn’t dropped a set in his six matches leading to his second Major final (he’d lost to Federer in the previous year’s US Open final), while Tsonga’s run to the final also included the scalp of ninth seed Andy Murray in the first round.

The Serb eventually claimed his first (of fourteen and counting) Major title, but not before dropping the first set in the final against the determined Tsonga, who just failed in his bid to become the first unseeded man to win a Major since Gaston Gaudio at the 2004 French Open.

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Exactly two years later, Tsonga would get his revenge in the quarter-finals, edging out Djokovic in five sets and advancing to the semi-finals where Roger Federer would prove too good.

In fact, the pair share a very healthy rivalry, having met at all four Majors and been involved in numerous epic battles, none more so than in the quarter-finals of the 2012 French Open where Tsonga went up two sets to one, then held four match points in the fourth set, before capitulating 6-1 in the final set.

This will be the earliest stage in which a previous final rematch has taken place at Melbourne Park since Andre Agassi and Rainer Schuettler (now the coach of Angelique Kerber) met in the second round in 2005, only two years after Agassi had thrashed “the memorable German” (as Sandy Roberts described him in 2013) in the championship match.

Another match to watch out for on Thursday is that between Milos Raonic and former Australian Open champion Stan Wawrinka, who is working his way back up the rankings after a knee injury saw him drop out of the worlds top 250 last year. Both registered first-round victories over Ernests Gulbis and Nick Kyrgios, respectively.

Today, both defending champions Roger Federer and Caroline Wozniacki are in action, as is men’s second seed Rafael Nadal.

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