Heather Watson reached the third round of Wimbledon for the second time with a brusque, high-pressure and in the end rather straightforward 6-4, 6-2 defeat of Daniela Hantuchova in gruelling late-afternoon heat. For Watson this was a performance of controlled energy and no little tactical success as the British No1 found pretty much the perfect foil for her scurrying, no-frills game. The more Hantuchova looked to hit hard and flat from the centre of the court the more Watson moved her decoratively immobile opponent from side to side, the Slovak by the end swishing away with all the concrete-footed resignation of a tail-end fast bowler facing the new ball.
A place in the third round represents a notable high for Watson after a difficult couple of years during which her ranking has loitered in the low register, her elbow has throbbed intermittently and her status as British No1 has seemed at times to be related as much to the lack of fit available high-end talent elsewhere as her feats on the court.
By the end here Watson was even doing that rare thing in a British tennis player, surging for the line, as she produced a series of scythed backhand winners to tee up a third-round match with Serena Williams. Laura Robson and Sam Smith have both reached the fourth round here in the 31 years since Joe Durie was a quarter-finalist. Watson has a chance of matching them, albeit one that might require a degree of magnification to become visible to the naked eye.
For now Guernsey’s most notable sporting export will revel in a fine, encouragingly relentless performance against an opponent who was ranked No5 in the world 12 years ago but who is by now a well-seasoned, long-limbed gazelle of a mid-ranking baseliner, comfortably into the troisième âge of a 16-year professional career.
Hantuchova still hits the ball hard and flat when it is within the arc of those long, elegant levers. But her lack of lateral movement was evident from the opening game as Watson put two relatively mild sliced forehands past an opponent displaying all the mobility of an ornamental hat stand. The British No1 had promised a fast start after a slow-burn performance in the previous round against Caroline Garcia that saw her so tense that by the end she had left an angry red mark from slapping her own thigh in an effort to gee herself up.
For all that, Watson started slowly. On a strangely sated, somnolent, post-prandial No1 Court there were no cheers, no cries of “Lets go, Heth!” and in fact very little noise at all as the only remaining British woman went 3-1 down with surprisingly little resistance as Hantuchova enjoyed what would turn out to be her best spell of the match.
If Watson has an obvious fault it is simply her lack of obvious strengths. She is instead a player who feeds on mistakes, who hopes to prolong the point, to win by not losing just yet, all-round efficiency making up for a lack of real gun shots. Like so many other British players – and here is where Laura Robson remains a more tantalising prospect – she does not win many easy points, thanks to a lack of basic power and reach that made her early meekness here all the more galling.
To her credit Watson instantly upped her levels, hitting harder, moving Hantuchova around and quickly breaking back. The next game she held serve to move to 3-3 with a punch of the air and the first exploratory cheers from a sleepy late-afternoon crowd. Energised, Watson broke again to take a lead she would not concede. Hantuchova continued to hit flat and long but with little imagination. In the end the Czech’s most notable contribution to the match was probably her pleasingly low-key shot-grunt, a slightly haunting atonal vibration like the sound of a mediaeval organ pipe being gently tuned up.
Watson was revving up through the gears now, drawing the crowd into the game as she won four games in a row to go to 5-3, then sealed the first set with some waspish cross-court groundstrokes from both wings. At which point Hantuchova looked, frankly, a little shot in the sunshine, limping around the court like a fond old horse whose race is run. The world No46 meandered to 0-40 in her opening service game of the next set and with Watson still finding joy hitting wide to a leaden-footed opponent, the match was the Briton’s to lose.
She did her best for a while, producing a limp service game to hand Hantuchova a break back, as neither player seemed to want to hold. But Watson had the momentum. As she closed out the match at a gallop she turned and waved to her family and her coach, Greg Rusedski, before executing an endearingly klutzy bow to a crowd that cheered her off with genuine affection.
Rusedski has already suggested Watson can become the first British woman to reach the top 20 since Durie. For now Watson can simply concentrate on that meeting with Williams, a five-times winner here but out in the third and fourth round in the past two years. And on savouring the rare sweetness of back-to-back victories against high-class opponents in a home grand slam tournament.
