The 2018 US Open Women’s Final will forever be remembered for two things: the debut Grand Slam win of rising star Naomi Osaka, and the angry confrontation between her final opponent Serena Williams and the match umpire Carlos Ramos, which overshadowed the final result.
Osaka won the first set thanks to two service breaks, but the drama began in the second game of the second set. First Ramos penalised Williams for a coaching violation after he deemed that her coach Patrick Mouratoglou had been advising her from the stands. Williams appeared to brush off that penalty after a long conversation with the umpire, and subsequently went 3-1 up. But in the next game, Osaka broke back and Williams smashed a racket in frustration, earning a code violation and a point penalty, which meant she started the next game a point down.
Williams began to argue with the umpire intermittently, referring again to the first penalty violation. Osaka, meanwhile, held her serve to make it 3-3, then broke Williams again to lead 4-3. At this point, Williams went further, accusing the umpire of being a thief, which was deemed to be a third violation and a game penalty was awarded, giving Osaka a 5-3 lead. Although Williams appealed to the match referee, the penalty was not overruled. She won her next service game to make it 5-4, but in the midst of the drama, Osaka held her nerve to serve out and win the tournament.
For Osaka, the victory capped a remarkable year. She had started 2018 ranked 68th in the world, but a series of notable victories caught the attention of the tennis world, including her victory at the Indian Wells tournament. She climbed steadily up the rankings, and by the start of the US Open, was the youngest player inside the top twenty, ranked 17th. She benefitted from the defeats of Caroline Wozniacki and Petra Kvitova, and dropped only one set on her way to the final, where she became the first Japanese player ever to win a Grand Slam singles event.
Williams was the pre-tournament favourite, according to the implied probabilities on the bigbetbookmaker.com site, and had looked comfortable in all of her games prior to the final, with the exception of her Fourth Round win over Estonian Kaia Kanepi, who became the only woman other than Osaka to take a set from the American. Kanepi had earlier pulled off a major shock in defeating the tournament second-favourite and French Open winner Simona Halep in the First Round.
In fact, it was a tournament of shocks, in which Maria Sharapova and defending champion Angelique Kerber, along with Wozniacki and Kvitova, all departed before the quarter-finals. And the success of Osaka, along with the rise of her semi-final opponent, Madison Keys, who was reaching the last four of a Grand Slam for the second time in her career, signified a potential changing of the guard in women’s tennis and perhaps the twilight of Serena Williams’ remarkable career.
