A first-round win, then a quarter-final minutes later
Serena Williams walked back onto Arthur Ashe Stadium on Tuesday night for the first time since 2022, played two matches inside a couple of hours and left the US Open mixed doubles at the quarter-final stage. The scoreline that ended it read 5-4 (7-4), 4-1 to Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli.
The format explains the compressed schedule. Sets in this event run to four games, which turns a full round into something closer to an extended tie-break, and the wild-card pairing of Williams and Carlos Alcaraz needed to survive an early deficit in their opener against Erin Routliffe and Lloyd Glasspool. Routliffe and Glasspool broke Alcaraz’s first service game and moved 3-1 ahead.
Williams held the set together from there. She saved two set points at 3-3, delivered a pair of aces to hold for 4-3 and struck a forehand winner off a Routliffe serve to set up the decisive break. Her side closed the set 5-3, then won seven of the final eight games for a 4-1 second set.
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Bencic and Cobolli in a different gear
The quarter-final started minutes later against a fourth-seeded pair who had just swept Taylor Townsend and Alexander Zverev. Bencic and Cobolli had won all four sets they played on the day. They took the opening tie-break 7-4 after a Williams groundstroke drifted long at 4-6, with Cobolli closing it out on an ace.
A Cobolli return then forced a mishit from Alcaraz on game point in the fourth game of the second set. That break gave the Swiss-Italian pair a 3-1 lead and the match. They face Elina Svitolina and Gael Monfils in Wednesday’s semi-finals.
Two comebacks measured in months
For Alcaraz the evening carried more weight than the result. He had not played a competitive match since a wrist injury in April, an absence of roughly five months that cost him the French Open and Wimbledon. He opened with a double fault. “I was out for four months and a half, almost five months,” he said. “I almost forget how it feels stepping on the court once again.”
The two-time and reigning US Open champion is still the man to beat in the men’s singles draw, with world number one Jannik Sinner out through a knee injury. Williams is not entering the women’s singles. Her season has produced a first-round Wimbledon loss to Maya Joint and a first-round doubles exit in Cincinnati alongside her sister Venus. “I never expected to be back on this court,” she said after the opening win. “I never thought this would happen.”
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