STINSON: Raducanu ends Fernández’s remarkable US Open streak

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There couldn’t be two Cinderellas at the end.

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Leylah Fernández’s remarkable run at the US Open ended on Saturday when the Canadian teenager was defeated in the final by the other upstart of the tournament, 18-year-old British Emma Raducanu.

Raducanu, who was born in Toronto and moved to London with her Chinese and Romanian parents when she was two, fared slightly better in the first grand final between two non-seeded players, closing the match on her third championship point with a ace to win in straight sets (6-4, 6-3). A tense and tight match ended with a touch of drama, as Raducanu needed a medical timeout to deal with a cut to his leg in the final game as he was about to face a break point and Fernandez had all the momentum. The knee was repaired, was able to save the break point and won the match a few points later.

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“I honestly don’t know what to say,” Fernandez, the 19-year-old from Montreal, said when he finished.

“I am very proud of myself for the way I have played the last two weeks,” she said. “Thank you New York, thank you all.”

“I hope we will meet in many more tournaments and hopefully in finals,” said Raducanu, who became the first individual player, male or female, to win a Grand Slam after going through the qualifying rounds. Ranked 150 on the WTA tour before the tournament, she won all 10 matches, three in the rankings and seven in the main draw, in straight sets. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Having played four straight three-set matches to reach the final, Fernandez seemed to have lost only a little of his usual energy. He struggled to get his first serve in play, landing only 50% of them in the first set, but still managed to hold on thanks to his deep reserves of cunning and poise. He dropped the first two games of the first set, but instead of going down quickly, he struggled back to level the set, only dropping it when Raducanu broke a pair of beautiful forehands in the 10th game. The Canadian took the lead in the second set, but Raducanu, who was ranked 338th in the world before reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon in July.

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Fernandez was still fighting late in the second set, saving two championship points and getting that break point before the medical timeout. But Raducanu was able to win the set and victory in the end.

“I want to say that I hope to be back here in the final and I want to be with the trophy,” Fernández said. “The correct one,” he added with a smile.

He also said, on the 9/11 anniversary, that he expected to be as strong and resilient as New York has been for the past 20 years, a statement that drew a great roar from the packed crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Before he got hit a ball on Saturday, it had already been a tournament for Fernandez for which there really aren’t enough positive adjectives. It wasn’t just that she had beaten three seeds in the top five, Naomi Osaka, Elina Svitolina and Aryna Sabalenka, in the space of a week, plus a former US Open champion and world number one Angelique Kerber, she was the way she beat them.

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Each of those matches was split into three sets, and there were moments in each of which the Canadian’s most experienced and highest-ranked opponents took over. These were the cases where it would have been completely normal for a non-seeded teenager who had never plunged into a Slam before to sink silently. It’s what happens in tennis, most of the time: the veteran picks up momentum, the rookie loses focus for just a minute or two, and then the game is almost decided.

But Fernández just didn’t allow it to happen. She stayed true to her game, a bit unorthodox, left-handed and with a tendency to attack balls early and use unusual angles of return, which seemed to unsettle her opponents. Most importantly, he didn’t make mistakes, or at least not many of them, at the exact times you would expect someone of his limited experience and age to make them. Osaka, Svitonlina and Sabalenka had clear moments of exasperation on the court, as if they couldn’t believe this very small boy was doing this to them. Osaka and Sabalenka broke at least three rackets out of frustration with each other.

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Most notable of all this is that Fernández, at this point in his young career, had shown no indication that he was about to become a murderous threat of giants. He was a promising talent and was in the midst of an excellent first full season at the highest level of the WTA tour. But he was 13-12 years old in 2021 before coming to New York, and he was 5-8 since early April. Her US Open career naturally invites comparisons to Bianca Andreescu’s two years ago, but by the time Andreescu arrived at Flushing Meadows that season, she had already won at Indian Wells and Toronto and was moving up the WTA rankings. He was 32-5 that season before the US Open, and two of those losses were recalled due to injuries. Fernández had none of that, and yet his display of cunning and nervous resilience in New York was so good that by the time he beat Sabalenka it didn’t seem like a fluke at all.

And now that? She was relatively unknown two weeks ago and is now one of the sports stars. His family had talked about the financial difficulties of supporting his elite training, and now he has a check of more than $ 1.2 million to prove it, almost ten times what he had previously earned in his professional career.

The world has changed for Leylah Fernández with a storybook that is almost too crazy to be true. No one who has seen it thinks it will be the last.

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