Welcome to Wombledon Day Thirteen
Iga Swiatek wins Wimbledon! Talking her dominance today, feeling for Anisimova and the problems with best of three sets
Iga Swiatek is the 2025 Wimbledon champion. She wins her sixth grand slam title, her sixth consecutive slam final and her first Wimbledon. She wins her first title since Roland Garros 2024 and is the only active woman to win grand slams on all three surfaces.
This was also only the second women's Wimbledon final to end 6-0, 6-0, finishing in just 57 minutes. It’s just the second grand slam final double bagel in the open era and the since Steffi Graf beat Natasha Zvereva at Roland Garros 1988 in 34 minutes.
Swiatek also becomes the first player to win a grand slam with a 6-0 set in the semifinals and the final. She won 20 consecutive games across her last two matches to win Wimbledon.
This is an incredible run from the Pole and one of the great individual performances in tennis on the biggest stage in the sport. At the same time, it is a gut-wrenching performance for Amanda Anisimova and a difficult watch in many ways.
Out on Centre Court we saw the two biggest extremes of emotion: the biggest moment of euphoria in a career compared to the most intense feeling of heartbreak and sadness.
My expectation for the start of this Wimbledon final was that Anisimova would be nervous. She was playing her first ever grand slam final and doing it on the biggest stage possible against a woman who has been at this stage five times over.
In the first game of the match, every point Swiatek won was an error from Anisimova on the third shot of the rally, the first shot for Anisimova after the serve. She was repeatedly shanking the ball in these early stages.
I didn’t expect those nerves to continue for so long in the match of course, but when you’re up against Iga Swiatek it’s hard to stop them effecting you. Swiatek never lets opponents settle, keeping up the intensity and focus on every single ball.
There’s a lot to praise from Swiatek’s perspective today, but it’s hard not to feel like the result today was more down to Anisimova’s nerves and fatigue impacting proceedings more than Swiatek was at times.
Swiatek hit just 10 winners in this match while Anisimova hit 28 unforced errors. Of the 55 points Swiatek won today, half were Anisimova errors. She won three times as many points off Anisimova errors compared to her own winners.
The winners she did create were magnificent in fairness, including a brilliant one right on the line after a long rally on match point, but they were rare in the first set especially because points ended before she could craft the winners in a rally. When points were finishing in three or four shots on Anisimova’s racket, what more do you need to do?
This is also not the first time Swiatek has beaten someone in a big final so convincingly. She won her first WTA1000 title in Rome in 2021 beating Karolina Pliskova 6-0, 6-0 in the final there. She dropped just four games in her Roland Garros 2022 final and dropped three in the final last year.
What defines many great players is that they don’t get impacted by the nerves of a big final, that it doesn’t inhibit their normal game. What defines Iga Swiatek is that she gets even better in big finals, it elevates her abilities.
While Anisimova was poor throughout, she failed to win a single game because Swiatek never let up the intensity for a second. Even in the final game of the match she was still fist pumping and shouting “come on!” with full commitment.
It got to a point where I wondered whether it would be better for Swiatek to gift Anisimova a service game or two just to make things less awkward and upsetting for her. In the end I decided it would be more patronising to do so and that it showed more respect to keep the level up. She stayed professional until the very end.
It sounds silly to say, but Anisimova did actually improve her level in the second set even if the scoreline doesn’t reflect that at all. Where points were often ending within three or four shots in set one, the American did manage to actually get herself into extended rallies repeatedly in set two.
You could see what Anisimova was trying to do tactically, but she just couldn’t execute her finishing shots. She repeatedly got Swiatek in cross court rallies, forehand to forehand or backhand to backhand, and tried redirecting the ball down the line with her forehand on several occasions but put the ball in the tramlines more often than not.
She was getting those exchanges that were limiting movement, keeping the ball directly in her strike zone and forcing Swiatek to hit back to her, letting Anisimova dictate when the ball was going to change direction. Unfortunately for Anisimova, she just couldn’t turn enough of those into winners rather than errors.
By the end of the match, I think it was also clear that the issue wasn’t just “nerves” for Anisimova. Midway through the first set my girlfriend texted me saying that she looked mentally burnt out, which ended up being quite astute analysis as Anisimova believed a big reason for her performance today was fatigue.
She had hit the wall in her match against Sabalenka to get over the line there and had nothing left to give physically or mentally in the final. I find that makes the use of the word “intensity” to describe Swiatek’s performance even more fitting. She brought a physical intensity and an energy that Anisimova just couldn’t match at any point.
As an open and unabashed Swiatek fan, I am obviously happy with this result for her, but I do feel a lot for Anisimova. It’s hard for this result not to feel uncomfortable and awkward at the very least. This was the biggest match of her life, and she had the worst result possible. Literally everything went wrong.
I felt particularly sad for her having to come out to do an on-court interview with her runners-up trophy. I do think it probably helped her to some extent to say a few words, especially thanking her mum, but it just felt somewhat cruel to have to go through that embarrassment on court and then take to a microphone to apologise for it afterwards.
It would be a lot easier to feel pure joy for Swiatek and appreciate how good a performance she brought out there today had the scoreline been comfortable but not so one-sided.
A scoreline and match like this also brings out a lot of predictable but very frustrating comments from misogynistic types who want to belittle women’s tennis as much as possible. I’m sure this will be exacerbated by the men’s final tomorrow going to five sets and being declared an all-time-great match.
Best of three set matches do make these types of one-sided scorelines all the more likely. Nerves are a factor in every match in any format, but in best of three sets there’s even more pressure to start well because you can be on the brink of losing in the blink of an eye.
I’m not saying that had this been a best of five sets match Anisimova could have staged some sort of dramatic comeback, but it would have given more chance to settle and to get more games on the board.
Nadal lost a 6-0 set to start the Wimbledon 2006 final but managed to win the third set to make the match more of a contest. It doesn’t necessarily change the outcome, but it stops the occasion from becoming so awkward and uncomfortable.
There have been plenty of men’s grand slam finals that were extremely dull as best of five contests, however. You could sense the direction of travel in last year’s Wimbledon final in the first 10 minutes. There have been several Roland Garros finals Nadal has won where he’s barely dropped more than four or five games.
Considering how dominant Iga Swiatek is in finals, I think it’s fair to wonder if she would be dropping many more games were there to be a set or three more to be played. She might end up similar to Nadal in her lethal efficiency, but it removes some of the chance for that.
Wimbledon finals in the 2020s have been especially impacted by the nerves and need to settle fast in best of three. We’ve had a lot of first-time grand slam finalists and almost exclusively first-time Wimbledon finalists. The unique pressure of Centre Court gets to many. What that means is that the final is defined often by who can conquer their nerves and play their normal game beyond anything else.
When you’re not on the brink of defeat after losing just one set, you have far more time to find your feet and get yourself back into the match. Carlos Alcaraz lost the first five games of the 2023 Wimbledon final before he turned that match around completely, for example.
More broadly, it is very frustrating how often grand slams are defined by the quality of their finals. Wimbledon 2023 was amazing on the women’s side with countless classics like Swiatek-Bencic, Svitolina-Azarenka, Rybakina-Jabeur and Sabalenka-Jabeur. What gets remember from that tournament however is that Jabeur played terribly in the final and it was all anticlimactic.
The men’s side of the tournament was ok at best with very few thrilling matches and less interesting stories. That didn’t matter though because we got a classic and absolutely historic final with Alcaraz beating Djokovic over five sets. The men get a chance to redeem themselves with an epic final in the way the women don’t.
Even the great women’s finals of the past few years like Sabalenka-Rybakina in Australia or Swiatek-Muchova in Paris in 2023 don’t get the same recognition that Wimbledon 2023 or Roland Garros 2025 does on the men’s side.
Best of five sets doesn’t solve everything, but clearly it allows the opportunity for higher peaks which is what the sport is known for best. You can forget something like the Wimbledon 2024 final quickly, you can never forget Roland Garros 2025.
I’ll end on some more optimistic thoughts on what this win means for Swiatek and where she’s at. Primarily, winning Wimbledon completely shifts a lot of the narratives surrounding her. Most notably that she couldn’t play on grass but having grand slams on all three surfaces more broadly is a remarkable and unique feat. Only eight women have ever achieved that.
She has ended a year-long title drought and done it in some style making it another grand slam she’s won. She has now also won a “big” title- grand slam, WTA1000 or WTA Finals- in every year of the 2020s:
2020- Roland Garros
2021- Rome
2022- Doha, Indian Wells, Miami, Rome, Roland Garros
2023- Roland Garros, Beijing, WTA Finals (Cancun)
2024- Doha, Indian Wells, Madrid, Rome, Roland Garros
2025- Wimbledon
She truly is the leader and defining player of the decade thus far. This is a most emphatic return to form as well as a sign of her willingness and ability to adapt.
Swiatek has also turned around her game in impressively short time. Back in March I wrote about how two of the biggest issues facing Swiatek where the poor quality of her serve and her return position being far too aggressive and costing her at times.
This Wimbledon, she has consistently served far better with higher first serve percentages, more consistent ability to hit spots and serve at higher speeds. She has also returned from a slightly deeper position and consistently had a brilliant returning performance all tournament.
It feels like a completely different player to the one who faced Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals of Roland Garros and was getting first serves returned like they were nothing. It felt like a long way back for her to get to the top of the game again and yet she’s already there.
One of the other wonderful things about this title for her is that it the overriding feeling for Swiatek seems to just be pure joy. She looks like she’s been enjoying her tennis all fortnight and was absolutely delighted all through her trophy ceremony and beyond.
For a player who so often shows signs of being deeply stressed and on the edge between calmness and intense anxiety, it’s reassuring to see. She has time to enjoy this title with several weeks off before the North American hard-court swing begins and it looks like she will relish every second of it.