A second-set wobble, and no panic
Taylor Townsend does not have a seeding next to her name. She has the fourth round instead. The American beat No. 15 Diana Shnaider 6-2, 6-7, 6-3 on Friday in New York, the third time in her career she has reached the last 16 at Flushing Meadows.
The first set never looked like a contest. Townsend took it 6-2 and had Shnaider chasing from the baseline. The second went the other way, decided in a tiebreak, and it would have been easy to read that as the match turning. It did not. Townsend reset and took the decider 6-3.
This follows her win over Jelena Ostapenko in the previous round, 7-5, 6-1, a rematch that also went her way in straight sets. Two seeds gone in two rounds for a player nobody put in the draw predictions.
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The doubles player nobody wants in singles
Townsend has three Grand Slam doubles titles to her name, which tends to be how she is introduced. The singles record is thinner. She has never reached a quarter-final at a major, and the fourth round is where the runs have stopped each time.
Breaking that pattern now means going through the world No. 1. Aryna Sabalenka is defending her title in New York and moved into the last 16 by seeing off Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3, 6-4, having already survived an awkward opening match against Camila Osorio.
An open half of the draw
The women’s draw has been shedding seeds all week. Ann Li put out 16th seed Belinda Bencic. Emma Navarro took out the No. 7 seed. Shnaider is the latest to go, and the players left standing on that side of the sheet are not the ones the bracket expected.
Townsend gets Sabalenka on Sunday. The gap in ranking is enormous. The gap in form, on this week’s evidence, is smaller than it looks.
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