WTA Match of the Year, No. 2: Victoria Mboko escaped Elena Rybakina, and drove her home fans berserk, in Montreal Cinderella run

This week, Steve Tignor will reveal his WTA Matches of the Year, and the TENNIS.com editors will reveal our WTA Players of the Year. Check out our ATP Matches of the Year and ATP Players of the Year.

You can’t keep a big tournament down. That’s what the two Canadian Masters events, in Montreal and Toronto, showed us this summer.

Because they started so soon after Wimbledon, both suffered from star-player withdrawals—Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Novak Djokovic on the men’s side; Aryna Sabalenka on the women’s. And because the tours expanded them, they were saddled with strange schedules that overlapped with Cincinnati and ended with mid-week finals.

Yet in the end, both were rescued by crowd-pleasing title runs from charismatic young stars. Ben Shelton won his first Masters 1000 in a series of close matches in Toronto, and Victoria Mboko did the same in Montreal.

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Mboko’s run was the more electrifying for a few obvious reasons. She’s Canadian. She was just 18 at the time. And she was an unseeded, 85th-ranked wild card who defied the odds with virtually win she recorded. Mboko had shown a good deal of promise in her rookie year, winning four straight titles on the ITF Circuit without dropping a set. So there was some built-in buzz around her when she arrived in Montreal. With each of her first three wins, that buzz grew little louder. It finally turned thunderous during her fourth-round match, a 6-1, 6-4 dismantling of No. 1 seed Coco Gauff.

From that point on, Mboko was a capacity-crowd attraction and a nationwide phenomenon. She rode the support, her speedy counter-punching style, and a thoughtful, never-cave mindset all the way to a comeback final-round win over Naomi Osaka. But it was her semifinal victory, against Elena Rybakina, that was the most dramatic and improbable.

I wanted as much as I can to put as many balls in the court and to fight as hard as I possibly could. I wanted to stay really calm as well. Victoria Mboko

For a set and a half, it looked as if Mboko had run into a wall she wasn’t ready to climb. Or a battering ram she couldn’t get around. Rybakina beat her with pace time and again, and won the first set 6-1. But losing sets is not something that fazes Mboko.

“I always think of sets as, like, checkpoints,” she said. “Once I finish the first set, I completely put it behind me, and I start a new little chapter…I put a lot more emphasis in my movement and my defending skills and what I’m supposed to do on court, and I try to sharpen up and clean up a lot of my mistakes.”

Mboko did all of those things in the second set against Rybakina. She started bending her serve wide into the deuce court, creating more pace with her forehand, and using a shot you don’t see often: The inside-out two-handed backhand. Despite all of that, she couldn’t shake Rybakina. Mboko went up 3-1 and 5-3, but Rybakina leveled the score both times.

Still, Mboko showed more belief with each game, and the crowd followed. The breakthrough finally came with Rybakina serving at 5-6, 15-30. Mboko ran forward for a short ball and angled an inside-out backhand pass for double set point. Mboko let out her biggest fist-pump, and the fans responded with their loudest roar.

In the third set, the roles were reversed. Mboko fell and hurt her wrist in the second game, but Rybakina, despite finding her serve and her game again, couldn’t shake her. The ninth seed went up 4-2, cracked an ace to hold for 5-3, and fired two straight forehand winners to reach match point at 5-4. But Mboko came up with a neat short-hop forehand in the next rally, and an impatient Rybakina sent a backhand flying wide. At deuce, Mboko hit a strong forehand return, and followed with an even better backhand return to break.

The match reached its inevitable destination in a third-set tiebreaker. Mboko went up 3-1, but again looked shaky with a lead. She double faulted and put a weak backhand into the net to make it 3-3 at the changeover. At 4-4, though, she summoned her courage and belief, and hit the shot of the match, an inside-in forehand winner that landed on the sideline, put her two points from the match, and sent the crowd into a frenzy. Rybakina couldn’t fight them any longer. From 4-5, she hit two balls long, and Mboko was into the final.

“It's unbelievable to even think about it,” said Mboko, who would finish the season another title, in Hong Kong, and a Top 25 ranking.

“I wanted as much as I can to put as many balls in the court and to fight as hard as I possibly could. I wanted to stay really calm as well.”

All of those missions—and a star-making performance—accomplished.