Swiatek vs Putintseva: Wimbledon Third Round Analysis

How Putintseva turned the match around and upset the world #1

cover 📸 credit: WTA Tour twitter

Yulia Putintseva recovered from a set down to snap Iga Swiatek’s 21-match winning-streak. With a flawless performance on Wimbledon’s no. 1 court, Putintseva achieved or improved several personal-bests:

• first win over Swiatek in 5 matches

• 2nd career win over a current WTA #1 (beat Osaka in 2019 at Birmingham, also on grass)

• first time reaching Fourth Round at Wimbledon

• fresh off a title run in Birmingham, extended winning-streak to 8 matches, her longest ever on the WTA Tour (had a run of 9 wins in 2012, spread across an ITF W100 event and Roland Garros qualifying).

A lot of the post-match focus fell inevitably on Swiatek’s unforced errors (35 by our count, compared to 10 from Putintseva) and how her forehand cracked.

Three key factors played out by Putintseva allowed her to take advantage of Swiatek's loss of confidence in her groundstrokes:

1. Raise in returning level

2. Superb ability to reduce unforced errors, defend and extend rallies

3. Relentless overload of Swiatek’s forehand side

Each point is considered only once. Therefore, aces are not included in winner totals and double faults are not included in unforced error totals.

1. Raise in returning level

Swiatek enjoyed a dominant start to the match on serve. By the time she reached a 4-2 30/0 lead in set 1, she had won 14 of 17 serve points.

All 17 points had a common theme: they had not gone past 3 shots.

This is how imposing those first 14 serve points won by Swiatek were:

• Serve: 3 aces + 4 return errors

• “Serve+1”: 5 winners + 2 forcing shots