Rybakina wins Australian Open after Sabalenka blows three-game lead in final set

While one of those previous losses had come against Keys here last year, the other two were inflicted by Coco Gauff – a woman whose stickability and seamless defence broke down Sabalenka’s resistance in New York three years ago, and then again in Paris last June.

After her first loss to Gauff, Sabalenka responded by slamming her racket in the locker-room bin. After her second, she gave an ill-judged press conference in which she complained that the wind kept blowing Gauff’s miscues back into the court. The mood at Roland Garros was so sour that she later had to smooth things over by joining Gauff in a TikTok dance routine.

This time, though, Sabalenka mostly kept a lid on her emotions, with the exception of a late bash of her racket into the courtside hoardings.

“Overall it was much better than last year, the two finals I lost,” she told reporters. “Level-wise and decisions that I was making and the way that the mentality was throughout the whole match, I was still there, I was ready to fight, I knew that she’s not going to give it easily to me. So I think overall I made huge improvement on that. I still lost it. But it’s okay. I feel like I’m moving towards the right direction.”

As for Rybakina, she delivered successive aces to close out the win and reverse the result of the 2023 final here, which featured the same two players. That night, it was Sabalenka who finished the stronger in one of the most memorable matches of the year. But this is an unpredictable rivalry, now standing at 8-7 in Sabalenka’s favour. When you bring together two women with such ferocious firepower, the outcome is always likely to be volatile.

Throughout the match, both players were serving at around 115mph and fizzing their groundstrokes so quickly through the court that one wondered whether the electronic line judges would be able to keep up.