Iga Swiatek shows steel in beating Kaia Kanepi to Australian Open semi-finals

The final point said it all. An 11-shot rally that started with a Kaia Kanepi serve and finished with Iga Swiatek’s racket somewhere other than in her hand. Poland’s world No 9 had spent the intervening 19 seconds stretching, sliding and almost slipping, but still somehow conjuring answers to each question set by her aggressor up the other end.

“Defensive” can mean all manner of things. An over-concern with self-justification. A means of driving a car safely. A negative way of playing football. In Swiatek’s case it was steely resolve, the bedrock of her three-hour passage to a second grand slam singles semi-final and first on a hard court.

The 2020 French Open winner was on the back foot throughout this finale of a point, just as she had been at many junctures over the course of three hours in 36C heat. Kanepi was sending down smash after smash and it was surely only a matter of time before one stuck. But when the Estonian landed a shot outside the tramlines, Swiatek’s pressure valve finally released, and with it went her racket, slung into the humid air inside Rod Laver Arena. An emotion-charged exclamation point on the longest match of her major career.

“I wasn’t even thinking a lot, I was just running,” Swiatek said. “I was actually thinking: ‘Where is like the biggest probability where she can hit the smash?’ It’s luck that you’re going to go the right way. There is that probability, but you never know what your opponent is going to do.”

Swiatek’s last two matches have been dogged examinations. Against SoranaCîrstea in the fourth round on Monday she lost the first set and rallied to win in three. On Wednesday she repeated the feat against Kanepi, the unseeded world No 115 and, at the age of 36, the oldest