Written by Ecaterina Boboc
Bianca Andreescu. Doesn’t ring a bell does it? Well, don’t worry; it didn’t ring a bell for me either until a few days ago.
She is an 18 year-old Romanian-Canadian professional tennis player, born in Mississauga.
After reaching a career-high ITF (International Tennis Federation) ranking №3 on February 1, 2016, and after playing some WTA tournaments, without being successful, she decided to give the first major tournament of 2019, the tournament of Auckland, a go.
Little did she know, she would end up reaching the final after defeating some major names of tennis history.
The road to the final was actually more dramatic than you would have expected it to be.
Because she had almost no WTA activity until then, she had to first qualify for the main draw. That means, that she had to play some more matches before the actual tournament, to get to play the tournament.
After stunning her opponents in those matches, she also won the first round. No one seemed to be worried about this particular newbie yet.
In the second round she had to play world №3, Caroline Wozniacki. Everyone was expecting Wozniacki to score an easy win over the so called newbie.
Little did everyone expect that everything would happen the other way around. The 18 year-old scored the biggest upset of the tournament with a 6–4 6–4 win.
The question everyone was asking themselves was, if this win was a one-time thing or if a future tennis legend had just been discovered. I guess the answer was yet to be found, because the unseeded teenager was about to play Venus Williams, a former world №1.
To get a grip of what that meant, Venus won two major titles the year Bianca was born.
After managing to kill yet another giant — after losing the first set[ 6–7 (1/7), 6–1, 6–3 ] — she stated:
“My goal was only to qualify and maybe get a couple of rounds in, but now I’ve beaten a couple of top players,”
“I believe that everything is possible and tonight I think I did the impossible.”
In the semis she played Hsieh Su-Wei, a not so well-known player. The win over her (6–3, 6–3) , wasn’t such a surprise after the two insane wins over two former world №1.
Bianca Andreescu was in her first WTA final! Will the 18 year-old complete her Cinderella story? For that to happen, she had to defeat the 30 year-old, 14. seed Julia Georges.
She was off to a good start, winning the first set with an impressive 6–2. But here experience made its entrance. Unfortunately, the Romanian-Canadian lost the following two sets with a score of 7–5, 6–1. The German took the third set in only 23 minutes as Andreescu was tired in her eighth match at the tournament.
After the win, Georges said: “I don’t know what to say right now because Bianca gave me a hard time today. She played some terrific tennis, different from a lot of players on the tour and I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot more of her.”
Andreescu, who entered №152 in world rankings and had to go through qualifying just to get in, put together some spectacular upsets on her way to the final in the tune-up event for the Australian Open.
Sources:wta.com
