Korneeva beats Perez Alarcon to complete Melbourne-Paris double

Fifteen-year-old Alina Korneeva added the Roland Garros title to the one she won at the Australian Open in January on Saturday. She proved herself to be incredibly solid under pressure to find a way through Lucciana Perez Alarcon 7-6(4) 6-3.

Alarcon, the No. 6 seed who played thriller after thriller here this week, did not become the first Peruvian player to win a Grand Slam girls’ singles title – but she can leave Paris with her head held high after a superb tournament.

Korneeva is now the first player to win the girls’ singles titles at the opening two Grand Slam events of the year since Magdalena Maleeva in 1990, and the first to win two majors in the same year since 2013, when Ana Konjuh won the title at both the Australian Open and the US Open and Belinda Bencic won the title at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon.

“It feels so different from the first title because it was my first Grand Slam so winning it was more pf a surprise but not here because I wanted to win that Grand Slam”, Korneeva said. “In Melbourne, I just wanted to enjoy the atmosphere of the Australian Open. Here it feels more like winning a normal tournament.”

Korneeva’s Grand Slam record now reads 12-0 – and after watching her play again all this week, it makes total sense. On Saturday, she showed why she was so tough to beat: she keeps finding solutions. Not the most powerful, she will still find the speed and the accuracy to send backhand winners to impossible angles or hit that forehand down the line as if it were the easiest shot in tennis.

Facing the impressive defense of Perez Alarcon, she showed she could handle heavy topspin as well as having to keep returning balls before winning a point. Down 2-0 in the first set, she won four games in a row but then had her only rough patch of the day, losing the next three games.

That’s when Korneeva, who reached the junior No. 1 ranking in May, showed how she was quite the competitor. She saved four set points by refusing to step back: she kept going for her shot, kept rushing to the net at the first opportunity, and battled her own frustration when she would make a mistake. She stuck to the plan and to the variety of her game and it paid off.

“Today was such an emotional for me because a lot of people were watching us”, Korneeva said. “I knew that if I wasn’t winning the first set, it was going to be difficult for me to play three sets. The first set was already one hour!

“I was so tired, and it was so hot today, so I wasn’t feeling energetic enough physically but I felt energetic enough mentally. She was running a lot, like a lot, and so far from the baseline so my plan was to do the drop shots. I don’t think I played as well I was wanting to, but I won because of my mental game.”

Perez Alarcon found no real patterns on which to build against Korneeva because she was facing an opponent that would rarely play the same sequences twice. She had no idea what to really expect and so she couldn’t settle into her game.

The Peruvian has played in so many tough matches here this week, coming from so many losing situations, that clearly on Saturday she was missing a bit of the extra sparkle that was present in previous matches. And she certaindly did not deserve to finish her Parisian adventure on a double fault.

In the end it was Korneeva’s ability to take the ball much earlier really made the difference. Korneeva, who won her biggest event on the ITF World Tennis Tour in March as a qualifier at the W60 in Pretoria, should soon join Mirra Andreeva, the player she defeated in the final in Melbourne in January, as one of the WTA Tour’s future stars.

She actually already has a professional goal for this year. “My secret goal is to play the qualifying at the US Open,” she said. But whatever happens, she will stick to following her father’s advice: “Just enjoy your game and play hectic!”

Korneeva could have become one of just a handful of players to win both singles and doubles in Paris – but she and Sara Saito, the top seeds in the girls’ doubles draw, were denied by the American pair Clervie Ngounoue and Tyra Caterina Grant, who recorded 6-3 6-2 victory later on Saturday.