Anisimova endures a hot Wimbledon nightmare after entering the Swiatek bakery | Jonathan Liew
This is what a scream with no vowels sounds like.This is the weight of the soul leaving the body.The arms are no longer connected to the legs, the legs have been severed from the lungs, the lungs have lost contact with the heart and the heart is getting ghosted by the brain.Amanda Anisimova sits on her chair, baking in the heat, stewing in sadness.She dabs her face with a towel and hopes people won’t notice she’s wiping away tears.
A faint voice from the outer edge of the universe calls time.She still has to go out there.She takes a deep breath.Lifts herself from her seat and takes the 18 long steps to her mark just behind the baseline.Ever found it a struggle getting up to go to work? Try summoning the strength to face Iga Swiatek when you’re losing 6-0, 5-0 in a Wimbledon final.
This was supposed to be the feelgood final.Two players who had already run through nettles and weeds to get to this point, who had already surpassed expectations, who in a way had already triumphed.Choose your own adventure: a heartwarming comeback tale for the ages, or the ultimate vindication of this generation’s greatest talent.Everyone’s a winner.How do you spin this irresistible yarn into something this bleak?“We’ll give you a moment,” Annabel Croft says a few minutes later as the tears flow again and the inevitable applause follows.
The groans and sighs of earlier have melted into sympathy and kindness.Centre Court tickets for women’s singles final day range from £240 to £315, and at that price value for money becomes a factor.But what this final lacked in actual tennis content it made up for as a historical artefact.The most one-sided grand slam final since the end of the cold war and an extra hour in the pub? Not a bad deal at all.And of course there were numbers that could help you make sense of it all: the fact Swiatek won the first set 6-0 despite hitting two winners, the fact 35% of all the points in this match ended in an unforced error by Anisimova, the fact only 78% of Anisimova’s second serves went in.
But really this game was most faithfully experienced as a kind of hot waking nightmare, a window into elite sport at its most brutal and exacting, a meltdown nobody truly saw coming.Did it matter that Anisimova looked nervous right from the start of her warm-up, when she kept flying the ball long and couldn’t even seem to throw Swiatek a proper lob? Or that, as she would later reveal, she felt so leaden in her morning practice that she had to take a break after every single rally? Perhaps.Perhaps not.But either way these little brainworms take on a life of their own very quickly, and there are few players like Swiatek better equipped at finding your pressure point and squeezing it, sadistically and unapologetically.Within two points Anisimova was getting pity cheers.
By the end of the fourth game her ball toss was going awry and she was picking listlessly at the strings on her racket.And for all the critics of the best-of-three format there is a real clarifying brutality to it too, the terrifying knowledge you can spend a lifetime working for this opportunity and about 25 minutes screwing it up.There is no real tactical expertise to bring to bear here.No technical analysis can ever satisfactorily explain how a player who was flaying apart the world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka two days ago now finds herself trapped in the Iga bakery, getting pinned down and force-fed.These are creatures of habit and routine, professional athletes who strive so hard to block out the external noise than when it finally comes crashing through the windows, it comes as a total shock to the system.
The key to consistent success at tour level is treating every game the same,The key to mastering the big moments is tacitly accepting that no, they’re not,Sign up to The RecapThe best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend’s actionafter newsletter promotionAs Swiatek climbs the steps to celebrate with her team, the score is still showing on the scoreboard, the clock frozen at 57 minutes,And of course at a time like this all kinds of thoughts must intrude,What just happened? What happens now? How do you begin the day full of dreams and promise and end it as the woman who lost a Slam final 6-0, 6-0?But of course Anisimova has endured worse things than getting double-bagelled in a Wimbledon final.
She’s suffered the sudden loss of her father as a teenager, despair and depression, a crisis of purpose and meaning that forced her to leave the sport for eight months.And if she came back from that, she can come back from this.No walk in tennis will ever be harder than the walk she made to the baseline at 6-0, 5-0 down in a Wimbledon final.No speech she ever makes will be harder than the one she made to the Centre Court crowd here.The heart breaks.
But it does not break for ever,
Zak Crawley stokes flames and sparks India’s fury in tetchy heatwave Test | Andy Bull
Shubman Gill takes issue with England opener’s delaying tactics at end of gruelling day of blood and sweat cricketAs recently as 1878, a crowd of about 15,000 people paid to watch 18 men spend six days walking in endless circles around the Royal Agricultural Hall, in a 500-mile race for the inaugural Astley Belt for endurance pedestrianism. The competitors were made to eat, sleep and go to the toilet in little tents set up by the side of the track.According to the reports, by the fourth day there were three “forlorn, destitute, ragged” men left in contention. “Their boots were hanging to their feet by shreds.” Everyone else had been finished off by injuries, irritation and exhaustion
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No Half Measures leaves trainer Richard Hughes in tears after July Cup success at 66-1
The July Cup, sprinting’s midsummer championship race, came up with a boil-over to match the soaring temperatures as No Half Measures, at 66-1, gave the former champion jockey Richard Hughes a first Group One success as a trainer to add to the dozens he won in the saddle.Notable Speech, last year’s 2,000 Guineas winner, set off as a warm favourite despite racing at a sprint trip for the first time, but he could not find an extra gear in the closing stages after Neil Callan on No Half Measures hit the front a furlong out. The four-year-old filly stayed on strongly to the line to beat Big Mojo (12-1) and Run To Freedom (40-1), a tricast that paid out at nearly 28,000-1.No Half Measures is the biggest-priced winner in the July Cup’s 149-year history, and left her trainer in tears in the winners’ enclosure. “It’s brilliant,” Hughes said
Wimbledon 2025: Swiatek wins title after crushing Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 – as it happened
Right, that’s it from us for today – and from me for this Wimbledon. Many thanks for your company this fortnight, it’s been a blast as always. Do join Daniel tomorrow for coverage of Jannik Sinner v Carlos Alcaraz – after their nearly neverending French Open final last month, we can be sure it won’t be as rapid as today’s Wimbledon whitewash. Bye!Here’s Tumaini’s match report:Amanda Anisimova arrived in her first grand slam final in some of the best form of her career, but she fell apart under pressure in front of one of the greatest big-match players the sport has ever seen as Iga Swiatek inflicted a historic 6-0, 6-0 victory in 57 minutes to claim her long-awaited first Wimbledon title.This is the first time in the open era that the Wimbledon title has been won with a double bagel
Iga Swiatek races to first Wimbledon title with 6-0, 6-0 thrashing of Anisimova
Amanda Anisimova arrived in her first grand slam final playing the best tennis of her life but, under the stifling pressure of such a significant occasion against one of the greatest big-match players the sport has seen, her afternoon turned into the most difficult day of her career as a supreme Iga Swiatek dismantled the American 6-0, 6-0 in 57 minutes to claim her first Wimbledon title.This is the first time in the open era that the Wimbledon title has been won with a double bagel. The last 6-0, 6-0 result came in 1911, when the sport barely resembled its current form, with Dorothea Lambert Chambers’s win over Dora Boothby in the challenge match era, a time when the defending champion played just once. Steffi Graf’s 6-0, 6-0 win over Natasha Zverev at the 1988 French Open is the only other grand slam final to be decided by a double bagel in the Open era. Swiatek has now won each of her first six grand slam finals, a reflection of her mental toughness and her readiness to produce her best in the biggest moments
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