Ons Jabeur Will Play Iga Swiatek for the U.S. Open Women’s Singles Title

As at Wimbledon, Maillard was in Jabeur’s player box on Thursday night alongside Jabeur’s coach, Issam Jellali, and Jabeur’s husband, Karim Kamoun, who is also her fitness trainer.

“She sacrificed many things since she was little to experience this adventure,” Maillard said in an interview with the French newspaper L’Équipe this week. “She needed to feel that she could make progress in terms of her self-confidence, to believe completely in her project. She sensed clearly that she had something special. She had been told that since she was young, but she could not quite feel it herself. ”

Though Thursday’s duel in Ashe Stadium represented new ground for Jabeur and Garcia — neither had been in a U.S. Open semifinal — it also was a flashback. They were junior rivals who played in the U.S. Open girls event in 2010 in the quarterfinals and also played in three other junior Grand Slam events.

Jabeur won all those matches and has now beaten Garcia three times on the pro tour, all in major tournaments. Garcia said that though Jabeur’s spin and variety clearly posed her problems, she was not thinking back during Thursday’s defeat: more just struggling in the present to find solutions and let her game flow freely.

“It helped and not at the same time,” Jabeur said of her long-running head-to-head edge. “Because I know she was playing amazing tennis, and that puts a lot of pressure on you.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/sports/tennis/jabeur-swiatek-us-open.html