Leylah Fernandez turns final set around to sink Belinda Bencic at French Open

For a short while during a cool afternoon on the vast Court Philippe Chatrier, it would have been fair to assume that Belinda Bencic was moving away with her third round match at speed. She had fought back from a first set deficit to level her third round match at one set all, and then she had established a 2-0, 40-0 lead, distancing herself in the final set.

But over the course of her short career, Leylah Annie Fernandez, who stood unmoved across the net, has shown that these tight moments with her back to the wall are often when the best version of herself emerges. Fernandez retrieved the break in exactly that game, breezed through five of the six games that followed and eventually defeated Bencic 7-5, 3-6, 7-5 to reach the fourth round of the French Open for the first time in her career.

It has been eight months since two teenagers, Fernandez and Emma Raducanu, faced off in the US Open final and it is not only Raducanu whose subsequent experiences have demonstrated the complicated nature of following up a breakthrough result. While Fernandez, 19, has won a round at most tournaments and even won the Monterrey Open in February, her second career WTA title, , that tournament brought the only quarter-final she has reached since September.

Fernandez is extremely ambitious and focused, and these results have not lived up to the extremely high standards she sets for herself. But as Fernandez described her first five months of the season as “up and down”, she assessed her progress with striking maturity.

“We don’t see it as – how do I say this? – as a failure, the first five months,” she said. “I see it more as I’ve got a lot to improve and I can just get better. I think that’s what we want to do is just to get better,