Amanda Anisimova Defeats Wang Xinyu, Narrowly Escapes Amanda Anisimova

Because tennis is thinly disguised psychological torture, it is not a surprise when a tennis player looks like they are having a bad time. Even by those standards, Amanda Anisimova, while on court, wears her emotions on her sleeve; she can also look like she is wrangling with a very bad time and come out of the match with a win anyway. In her fourth round match against Wang Xinyu, this came out to somewhat exaggerated effect: At no point did Anisimova seem in real danger in losing, and yet there was a palpable frustration that she had not, partway through the first set, already convincingly won.

Throughout the match, Wang looked totally outclassed on, to borrow a baseball term, the raw stuff. Most of the rallies, particularly on Anisimova's serve, were over before they could get started. Anisimova has the sort of pure ball-striking that makes "30 Minutes Of Amanda Anisimova Backhands"–style videos extraordinarily satisfying to watch. When she is on, her game has a terrifying geometric purity. When she is not quite calibrated, it looks like she is playing herself out of matches, and for the latter reason, nobody would characterize Anisimova as a robot, or a machine.

Visibly struggling to handle Anisimova's groundstrokes, Wang tried to serve herself out of difficulty in her own service games. This was where Anisimova experienced the most frustration. While Anisimova's own serves went unreturned 40 percent of the time, Wang still had 35 percent of her serves unreturned, which is absurdly high in the context of women's tennis. (It would be nice to have tournament-wide context for unreturned serve percentage. Alas, after landing the Australian Open's CourtVision tab, I only found this gem of syntax: "All the match winning players are considered while calculating the average per match per player in the tournament for match winner and all the match losing players are considered while calculating the average per match per player in the tournament for match loser." At least the stat pages are functional!)