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MONTREAL – The toughest match to win is the match AFTER you pull off a huge upset.
And so, for 18-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko, No. 51-ranked Jessica Bouzas Maneiro was a challenge. A different kind of challenge. A new kind of challenge – being the favorite to win a quarterfinal at the WTA 1000 level is new territory.
But Mboko came through like a champion after a conservative start, winning 6-4, 6-2 and moving into the Omnium Banque Nationale semifinals.
There, she’ll meet No. 9 seed Elena Rybakina Wednesday night, for the second time in two weeks.
Achievement unlocked. Another experience gained that she didn’t have before. Thenn again, she’s on the accelerated program.
Engine idled, then revved
Mboko didn’t come out of the gate all tennis guns blazing. Bouzas Maneiro’s ball has a lot of topspin on it, a very different dynamic to attack relative to her earlier matches. She was too far behind the baseline at first, maybe getting her bearings.
And she appeared to focus on getting her first serve in, more than unleasing those 180-mph bombs.
Bouzas Maneira was targeting Mboko’s forehand more often than not and at the start, it was working well. That said, if we’ve all been focused on Mboko’s remarkable run, it was also a pretty massive occasion for the 22-year-old Spaniard.
Mboko let Bouzas Maneiro off the hook with some early break-point occasions early. But at the pointy end, Mboko broke her for 5-3. Then she was broken on a double fault. And then the Canadian broke for the first set.
The numbers were messy; Bouzas Maneiro’s 21 unforced errors were nearly a full set’s worth of gifts to Mboko. And the Canadian wasn’t far behind.
But there was never a whiff of panic; maybe, at most, one or two minor signs of frustration.
Mboko went down 0-2 in the second set. But then she ran off six straight games as the machine began to hum and, in directly inverse proportion, Bouzas Maneiro faded.
“I feel like I kind of had a little bit of a slow, rocky start in the second set. I mean, I feel like I had to find a way to stay with her in the rallies. … She’s a really solid player, and she’s hitting really hard shots and very consistent shots. So I felt like I needed to up my level, and I needed to up my movement and up my focus,” she said in her post-match press conference. “Overall I think that was just my main focus during the whole second set. I really wanted to pump myself up a lot too. Yeah, I think that made like a pretty big change in the match.”
When it was over, Mboko raised her arms to her people, gesturing as though she couldn’t quite believe it.
But the winning is becoming a habit. And now the 18-year-old is into the top 50 with a bullet.
Number crunching on the rankings chart
The live ranking sits at No. 48. If she can beat Rybakina on Wednesday night, that would rise to No. 33 – very likely to be seeded at her first US Open with Zheng Qinwen out long term after elbow surgery.
If – and there’s a dream week, right? – she wins the tournament, she would leap into the top 25. That’s too insane to even think about for a player who began the season at No. 333.
But that’s the level of tennis she’s playing right now.
Mboko will be the second-youngest player in the top 50, behind just Mirra Andreeva – a precocious eight months younger.
The only other teen in the top 50 is Australia’s Maya Joint, who turned 19 in April. Mboko will turn 19 on Aug. 26 – which might well be the day she makes her US Open debut.
Next up: Rybakina
Mboko was beaten 6-3, 7-5 by Rybakina in the second round in Washington, D.C. just two weeks ago.
It’s a plus, in a way; she’s not played dozens of players at the top level. And in this case (as was the case with Gauff, albeit on a different surface), there’s less of a mystery to it the second time around.
“I think I just need to maybe up my level a little bit and just to stay in there with (Rybakina). You know, she has really great groundstrokes, really great serves. So I guess on that day I want to do my best to kind of stay in there with her,” Mboko said.
But Rybakina, as well, has a much better idea of what to expect. The honeymoon period that a young and rising player can enjoy before the rest of the WTA Tour gets a bit of a bead on her is closing quickly for Mboko. She’s impossible to ignore right now.
“She’s a tough opponent. She has really good strokes, and she plays fast, and she has really good serve. I feel like in Washington it was also a bit difficult for both of us since it was a night match, and the conditions were, like, very different. Now we are playing here, and it’s more consistent, I would say,” Rybakina said, after she won on an injury retirement in the first match of the evening against Marta Kostyuk and before she knew with certainty that Mboko would be her opponent.
“So she’s definitely dangerous. She has nothing to lose, and I’m sure she’s enjoying out there. Yeah, it’s going to be a tough one. Hopefully I can bring my best,” she added.
