Later, she talked about her emotions during the match.
“When you’re in the moment and you give everything, and it’s not just about on that court in that moment, it’s everything that goes before the match, months, years of the work that you put in. I just wanted it really, really badly.”
It’s a cliché, but in this case it may have been true: The winner was the woman who wanted it more.
For her part, Boulter took it with a stiff upper lip—or chin.
“It just didn’t come off the racquet today,” she said. “I think there are some days when you commit to your shots and they go in. That’s been my tennis a lot of recent. Today wasn’t quite that day.”
“I’ve just to take it on the chin.”
The men’s match that followed was the higher-profile of the two, but by the time the players took the court, the air had gone out of the arena a little, and many of the fans had left for a much-needed break.
Draper and Norrie never quite put that air back into Court 1. The first set was tight and energetically contested, and Norrie won it by playing a flawlessly dynamic tiebreaker. From there, though, Norrie was clearly superior. Even a fist-pump-filled third-set fight from Draper fell flat in the end, and the match finished in anti-climactic straight-set fashion.
