Maddison Inglis leaves Melbourne Park with a lot, including the high-end toaster she’s always wanted. There is pride, having reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open, but also disappointment. In the biggest match of the local qualifier’s career, the world No 2 Iga Swiatek proved too polished, securing a 6-0, 6-3 victory on Monday night.
The result leaves no more local players in the women’s singles draw. In the men’s singles, there is only Alex de Minaur, who plays top seed Carlos Alcaraz on Tuesday evening.
Against Swiatek, Inglis was up against a top 10 player for only the second time. The first set delivered a bagel, so she set out to prove she was worthy of her place, that she can handle the heat. In the kitchen of Rod Laver Arena, she broke the Pole at the start of the second set and celebrated – part show, part sincere – by jumping along the baseline, arms aloft.
“I could go the other way and just mope around like I lost the first 6-0, but I just wanted to enjoy it and try and keep the spirits up,” she said. “I was just like: ‘Keep fighting, I’ll get there, and if I don’t, it’s not the end of the world.’”
Inglis won two more games and had a near-miss at 2-4, dropping to her knees and squealing on a break point when her forehand flew just long. But she was smiling again – as she has done for much of the past two weeks – when she met Swiatek at the net. “I’m proud. I gave it everything these last two weeks,” she said.
Her tournament has included a dramatic run through qualifying, two tough main draw victories – including one against her close friend Kimberly Birrell, the world No 76 – and a walkover following Naomi Osaka’s last-minute withdrawal.
Yet Swiatek was something else. The 24-year-old is chasing a seventh grand slam title. If she wins it at Melbourne Park this week, she would be the third youngest player to complete a career grand slam.
“She’s just a next-level player,” Inglis said. “I don’t think I’ve had a lot of experience playing those matches, you just feel that pressure from every ball from her. It’s just … ‘I’ve kind of got to do something here. I’ve got to really take my chances that I get because I’m not going to get too many.’”
The 28-year-old’s WTA profile page lists winning a grand slam title and reaching the top 10 as goals, but the top 100 is her more immediate objective. When the rankings come out next week, she is tipped to be within a baker’s dozen of that threshold. “That jump from 113 to 100 is still a long way,” she said.
Reaching further than any other Australian woman at Melbourne Park has placed her firmly within a cohort, alongside Maya Joint, Daria Kasatkina, Birrell and Ajla Tomljanovic, as the country’s WTA Tour leaders.
“Honestly, going into this tournament, I didn’t think that I had that in me,” she said. “I had a chat to someone close to me the first day, and I was, like: ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get out on court, I just feel exhausted,’ and it’s the first tournament of the year.”
Inglis plans to play an ITF tournament in Brisbane next month, but more immediately she will watch her fiance Jason Kubler in the men’s doubles quarter-finals alongside Marc Polmans. She must also work out what to do with her $480,000 (£243,000) in prize money, roughly a fifth of her career earnings and what she described as “a lot of money”.
“I’ll definitely use a lot of it to invest back into my tennis and have some people on the road with me to support me and make some weeks a bit easier,” she said. “It’s a long year.”
The Gold Coast resident also intends to tackle her long shopping wishlist. At the top is a Mini Cooper, but she doesn’t believe she has earned that reward yet. Below the car on the list are home appliances, headed by a KitchenAid mixer.
That too can wait. Instead, Inglis is starting with something more modest. “I’ve wanted a Smeg toaster for so long [and] I just was, like: ‘No you can’t do that,’” she said, of an appliance that retails for a few hundred dollars. “That’s going to be my treat. And maybe the kettle, too.”
