Cam Norrie loved all 267 minutes of Wimbledon win over Nicolas Jarry, Alcaraz QF the reward

There are pros and cons to carnage. On the down side, every upset means a star player—i.e., someone with a fanbase—vanishes. On the upside, in place of those stars, you get stories. The prodigy on the rise, who we may be seeing for the first time. The veteran making a comeback after a career-derailing injury.

This year’s upset-heavy Wimbledon has been no different. Many of u might be missing Coco Gauff and Jack Draper at this stage, but we’ve had a chance to watch half a dozen players make career-best runs at Wimbledon they may never have expected themselves. Here’s a look at three players who kept those runs alive on Sunday.

Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova raised the bar for keeping calm and carrying on

What would you have done if this happened to you?

You’re serving at 4-4, game point. Your opponent hits a ball that’s clearly long. No call comes from the electronic system. The point is stopped. The chair umpire (we’ll pretend you’re good enough to play with electronic line calling and a chair umpire) says it must be replayed. You go on to lose that point and the game to go down 4-5.

Oh, it’s also the round of 16 on Centre Court.

Would you have cried, or screamed for the supervisor, or sat on the court like Luke Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums?

Pavlyuchenkova, who was the real-life victim of that mix of human and machine error, didn’t do any of those things. She complained, briefly; she stood in shock for a few seconds; she said the game was “stolen” from her; and she wondered if it happened because Kartal is “local.” Then she went back and started playing again, pretty much like nothing happened.

Kartal broke her for 5-4, and reached set point in the next game. But Pavlyuchenkova elevated from there, saving the set point and winning the tiebreaker 7-3. In the second set, she broke and survived a series of nervy holds, as the crowd pulled hard for her British opponent. On match point, at 5-4, the Russian drilled a perfect forehand down the line that even the speedy Kartal couldn’t track down.

Pavlyuchenkova celebrated the same way she had after her third round win over Naomi Osaka: With a calm fist-pump, and nothing else. In both matches, she has been a picture of composure under pressure. The 34-year-old credits it to experience, and recent work on her “mental toughness.”

“I’ve had so many matches in the past where I would just completely lose it,” she said. “For sure today, as well, having the crowd like that, having this call, yeah, I would probably be still talking about this call to my box for the next 10 games probably, maybe till the end of the match.”

Instead, she kept it in perspective. The only way to win was to put it behind her.

“It’s tough out there,” she said. “The crowd was against me. This situation there, but it’s a tennis match. I have to find a way and solutions. If I want to win, I have to go for it, no matter what.”

Pavlyuchenkova, who was diagnosed with lyme disease earlier this season, first played Wimbledon as a 15-year-old, in 2007. She has reached the quarterfinals just once before, in 2016. Now she has a chance to go a step farther.

Cam Norrie loved all 267 minutes of his epic win over Nicolas Jarry

“If it’s a cheap point, I was enjoying it. If it was a long rally, I was enjoying it. If I had a forehand winner, I was enjoying it.”

That has been the theme of Norrie’s season: Enjoying what he does again. Four years ago, the Brit surprised a lot of people when he soared into the Top 10; it was just as much of a shock when he plummeted out of the Top 100 last year.

Rather than despairing, though, he found that he was back in his comfort zone. He was the hunter again, rather than the hunted.

“I think it was just too much expectation,” he says. “I think now I’m just enjoying the tennis.”

“Just want to be who I am and react how I want to act and be myself…You’re the underdog again, finally. You can go and play.”

Norrie was very much who he is against Nicolas Jarry on Sunday at Wimbledon. As always, he hopped non-stop before each Jarry serve. He punctuated every winning point with a fist-pump and a racquet shake. He bounced the ball upwards of 20 times before hitting a second serve—to the irritation of Jarry. Most important, he bounced back from every disappointment as if it had never happened.

And there were a couple of big ones in this match. After winning the first two sets, Norrie reached match point in a third-set tiebreaker, only to see Jarry erase it. In the fourth set, Norrie reached 5-5 in another tiebreaker, two points from the win, only to see Jarry hit a couple of bullets past him.

In many cases, that would be enough for a player; he wouldn’t have any resistance left for the fifth. Instead, Norrie broke Jarry right away, and hung on for dear life the rest of the way—his hold for 3-0 took 10 minutes. Norrie withstood 46 aces and 103 winners from Jarry, and finally closed it out after four hours and 27 minutes.

“I think, if you're a junior player, I would maybe watch that match and look at his body language or both of our body languages for the whole match,” Norrie said. “None of us dropped our heads. We did nothing negative. It was all positive. He was getting fired up; I was getting fired up. I loved all of it.”

Will Norrie love meeting his next opponent, Carlos Alcaraz? He has two wins against the defending champ. Four losses, too, but I’m sure he’ll try to remember the wins. Either way, who wouldn’t enjoy taking a crack at the king on Centre Court, in front of 15,000 of your best friends?

Laura Siegemund showed a young opponent what a little—or a lot—of variety can do

“Her game, I really didn’t like it”

That’s what 21-year-old Solana Sierra said after losing to Siegemund on Sunday.

Join the club, Solana.

Siegemund has been making opponents not like her game for 16 years now. The 37-year-old, who debuted in 2009, never met a ball she couldn’t slice, or chop, or angle, or redirect, or change the speed on, or do something else that gets under your skin. She’s also an expert at controlling the tempo of a match. She holds her service motion for so long you might fall over waiting for it to finish.

On one point, the German may use all forehand slices, which curl as they cross the net and skid at your feet. Then, on the next point, she’ll drive her two-handed backhand straight down the middle of the court so you’re late on it. At one stage, after Siegemund took a drop shot and carved one back even better, all Sierra could do was raise her hands in exasperation.

The Stuttgart native has done all of that well enough to win two titles and reach No. 27 in the world. Surprisingly, though, her wily ways had never worked any wonders at Wimbledon. In eight tries, she had never been past the second round. Now she’s into the quarters, without dropping a set, in a run that includes a win over No. 6 seed Madison Keys.

“I did feel that I have good stuff for grass,” Siegemund says. “I love to come to the net. Love the slice. But I felt like I never have really enough time to kind of get confidence from my grass game, and maybe the precision here and there and when to do what.”

“This time I had already a few matches in Nottingham, I had more opportunity to get this confidence, and it’s showing.”

Siegemund’s biggest problem now seems to be containing herself.

“I feel really joy and pride,” she says. “You’re tempted to get so euphoric and so happy about what you've achieved, but you know, there

is a time for that.”

“So right now I was just very focused on my job, very focused on my game.”

Her next job: Driving Aryna Sabalenka crazy in the quarterfinals. On the right day, that seems doable.