Beatriz Haddad Maia had to dig really deep to beat Sara Sorribes Tormo in the fourth round of the 2023 Roland Garros.
When fans came to the Court Suzanne-Lenglen on Monday morning, they certainly didn't expect to watch the same match almost four hours later. One of the two early WTA matches started at the same time as Ons Jabeur's match, yet the Tunisian was done almost three hours earlier.
Neither Sorribes Tormo nor Haddad Maia had experience with playing a quarterfinal at a Grand Slam, so the big fight was expected. The Spanish player was coming into the match after yesterday's controversial doubles match when her and Bouzkova's opponents were defaulted for hitting a ball girl.
But the main controversy in the match was the fact that it was the Spaniard and her Czech teammate that requested the disqualification, and soon their social media profiles turned to a dark place.
Yet, it seemed that it didn't have any influence on Sorribes Tormo. The first set of the match was a real battle, but also a bad effort from the Brazilian to serve out the set after building a massive lead.
Haddad Maia was up 5-2 after breaking her opponent's serve two times, but Sorribes Tormo then won 12 of the following 13 points as her opponent broke her serve once more, but couldn't win more than one point on any of her attempts to serve out the set.
Sorribes Tormo then used her chances in the tie-break, mini-breaking all of her opponent's serve and winning it 7-3. Surfing on the wave of the first-set victory, the Spanish player had much better start into the second set.
Sorribes Tormo won the first three games, but that's when the fourteenth seed started turning the match around. She won the following seven games to win the second set 6-3, but also break her opponent in the third set and lead 1-0.
But the third set turned into a real rollercoaster. Both players had their chances and there were multiple breaks of serve. Sorribes Tormo never led by a break while Haddad Maia had that kind of lead three times.
After losing it on the first two occasions, she finally served out the match in the twelfth game of the decider, winning the match 6-7(3), 6-3, 7-5 in three hours and 53 minutes, surpassing her previous longest WTA match of the season when she battled for three hours and 41 minutes and ended in tears after the match.
Haddad Maia will now need to recover quickly as another difficult match is ahead of her. The Brazilian will be playing against the seventh-seeded Ons Jabeur who had to spend only 64 minutes on the court on Monday.
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