Victoria Mboko defeats collapsing Naomi Osaka for first WTA title at Canadian Open

Yahoo

2 days ago

It was a rough day for Naomi Osaka, and landmark one for the Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko.
Mboko, 18, came back to stun the four-time Grand Slam champion 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 in the final of the Canadian Open on Thursday, earning her the first WTA title of her career in front of a home crowd.
Had Osaka won, it would have been her first WTA title since the 2021 Australian Open, a span of 1,629 days. She will have to wait once more to return to the mountaintop — any mountaintop — after her extended hiatus in which she recovered from injuries and gave birth to her first child.
Both players entered the match with plenty of hope. It was Osaka's first WTA final since the 2022 Miami Open, and a chance to establish she was on her way to entering tennis' elite again. Mboko, currently 85th on the WTA rankings, was the local favorite, having upset No. 1 seed Coco Gauff in straight sets in the Round of 16 and beat Elena Rybakina, another top player, in a three-set comeback in the semfinals.
Osaka had the upper hand throughout the first set, but it all swung early in the second. She became visibly frustrated after a break and never regained her composure in front of a crowd boisterously rooting for her opponent.
She played a mistake-riddled game in the second set, then was even worse in the third set. It was a cacophony of unforced errors and negative body language, while Mboko kept gaining momentum. At one point, Osaka received a warning for smacking a ball up and into the crowd in frustration after a fault on break point, then missed a volley to further hand the advantage to Mboko.
It's not as if Mboko played the match of her life — she committed 13 double faults alone and needed Osaka's frustrations to get a foothold — but she played more than well enough to beat an opponent who seemed to be fighting herself as much as the person across from her on the court.