Five match points, none of them taken
Anna Bondar led 5-2 in the deciding set and served for the match. She double-faulted on the first match point, then double-faulted again on the second. Three more chances arrived in the following game and all three went the same way. Madison Keys is in the third round of the US Open on the strength of that sequence.
The 22nd seed lost the opening set 7-5, took the second 6-4, then found herself two games from the exit before breaking back to 5-5. The match ran just under three hours on Court 17 and finished 5-7, 6-4, 7-6 (5).
“Yeah, that was… that was something, huh?” Keys said in her on-court interview. “No stress, though. We all knew I had it, right? I mean you guys got me through that match and I’m so grateful.”
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Down 5-3 in the breaker, then seven of the last nine points
The tiebreak followed the same script as the set. Keys trailed 5-3 in the ten-point decider, won the next four points, then closed with the final three. Seven of the last nine points went her way after she had spent most of the previous half hour behind.
Keys reached the US Open final in 2017 and has spent the nine years since being talked about as a player whose ceiling in New York was never quite reached. At 31 she is unlikely to get many more afternoons like this one. The draw now opens up for her.
An easier Thursday for the rest of the seeds
Tenth seed Amanda Anisimova needed three sets to see off 18-year-old Lilli Tagger of Austria, winning 6-3, 3-6, 6-1. Belgium’s Elise Mertens, seeded 23rd, beat Maria Timofeeva 6-2, 7-6 (5), and 25th seed Marie Bouzkova dismissed Harriet Dart 6-2, 6-2.
Alexandra Eala, the 17th seed from the Philippines, got past Oleksandra Oliynykova 6-1, 6-4 on Louis Armstrong Stadium. Eala won 11 of her 14 points at the net and took 27 of 50 points on the Ukrainian’s serve, the kind of return numbers that tend to travel well into the second week.
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