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Halep's epic win over Kerber was a profile in courage

SAEED KHAN / AFP / Getty

For all the times it seemed Simona Halep could have or should have shut the door on Angelique Kerber during their lung-burning, nerve-fraying, impossibly tense Australian Open semifinal Thursday, there were multiple others when she could have just stood aside and let Kerber walk through.

She didn't, even as Kerber kept coming and coming, dusting herself off and rising from the ground like some undead, iron-legged avenger. Even after Halep fumbled away the second set, got broken right off the bat in the third, and fought back only to let three match points escape her, all on a bum ankle that had nearly forced her out of the tournament, Halep did not and would not roll over. After a merciless, 16-game, 72-minute bloodbath of a deciding set, she was still standing, a finalist in Melbourne Park for the first time.

Halep's career, to this point, has been a bit of a contradiction, a confluence of bravery and timidity. She's been resilient and fragile, a fighter and a deserter. (Her coach, Darren Cahill, temporarily walked away from her last year because of the negative attitude she would persistently adopt the moment the tide of a match began to turn against her.) She's been a terrible front-runner and a tenuous closer, and has typically played far better from behind than from ahead.

She's shown some incredible mental and physical fortitude, engineering miraculous comebacks (like beating Elina Svitolina from a set and 1-5 down at the French Open last year) and making Herculean stands (like saving three consecutive match points to outlast Lauren Davis in a 15-13 third set last week). She's also succumbed to mental and physical frailty, stopping short or outright collapsing at the finish line (like failing to serve out that same match against Davis three times, or failing to seal the deal three times last year when one match win would've made her the world No. 1, or, most notably, losing from 6-3, 3-0 up in the French Open final against Jelena Ostapenko).

On Thursday, those competing forces were on full display. Halep surged to a 5-0 lead in the first set, then inexplicably took her foot off the gas and allowed Kerber to run off three straight games, gather some momentum, and get back in it. In the second, Halep went up an early break, gave it right back, and then at 4-all earned two break points that could've set her up to serve for the match. She lost both, then dumped the next two games in a hail of unforced errors to give Kerber the set.

Tennis is usually a zero-sum game. Not just in the sense of there being a winner and a loser, but in the mechanics of every match and every point. If one player is being the aggressor, the other is being passive; if one is stepping up on big points, the other is backing down; if one is being brave, the other is being timid. That's not what happened in the third set of this match. In the third set of this match, both players stepped up, and got tight, and hit with astonishing courage.

Most of the opportunities that passed Halep by were simply points on which Kerber went for broke and got rewarded. With Halep serving for the match at 5-3 in the third and ahead 30-15, Kerber uncorked two monstrous down-the-line forehands in a row. On break point, the two slugged out a 26-shot baseline rally, dragging each other from tramline to tramline, until Kerber - who'd just recovered her balance after momentarily losing her footing - hit a crouching, acute-angled, backcourt winner.

Kerber still had to serve to stay in the tournament after that, and, looking drained from the effort of the previous game, quickly went down two match points. On the first, she smoked a backhand winner down the line. On the second, Halep opened up the court and went for the kill, but pushed a backhand long. Two more deuces ensued, and Kerber escaped. Then she broke Halep - converting her seventh of seven break-point chances - and served for a spot in the finals, and went up 40-15 to earn two match points of her own.

"I had actually two moments when I felt that the match was over," Halep later confessed to reporters. "I have no power anymore and everything is gone."

It's unclear if the moment she stared down double match point was one of them, but she didn't play like it. She took control of four consecutive points - with three forced errors and one clean winner - to break right back.

"Of course, I had the two match points, but she played good, so I could do nothing," Kerber said afterward.

"It was just a battle at the end. It's just one or two points which decide the match. I'm trying always to be aggressive, but on my match points she was the aggressive player. Other (points), I was the aggressive player. You always try to be the first who can go for it."

Considering everything - the stymied attempts to get across the finish line, the ankle injury, the accumulated exhaustion of six matches and that marathon against Davis, all the previous times she'd come so close and been turned away, her instinct to get down on herself - you kept expecting Halep to wilt; to let frustration get the best of her, to decide it just wasn't going to happen this time, wasn't worth the energy it would take to try. At the least, you expected her to shrink her margins and stop hitting her groundstrokes with such aggression and purpose.

In that crushing French Open loss to Ostapenko, Halep didn't do anything objectively wrong. She played solid and consistent tennis, defended doggedly, and committed just 10 unforced errors for the entire match. She put the ball on Ostapenko's racket, allowing her powerful but inexperienced opponent to make all the mistakes. But it backfired, and Halep ultimately got hit off the court by a player willing to take the risks she herself was not. She was determined not to let it happen again.

"When I played the final in the French Open," she explained in her on-court interview after beating Kerber, "I said that if I'll be in the same situation, I'll give my best, and be more..." - she took a second to search for the word - "...courageous."

Halep wound up hitting 50 winners - including 28 in the third set alone - to Kerber's 33. ("A lot, huh?" Halep said with a smile, when apprised of the total after the match). In a clash of two defensive-minded counter-punchers, one was always going to have to step outside her comfort zone, and rely more on her strokes than her legs. For all the scar tissue from her past struggles in these kinds of moments, for all the times she threatened to unravel in this match, it was Halep who served bigger when it mattered, who stepped further inside the baseline, who trusted herself more.

"I'm really proud of myself, actually," Halep said.

And she should be.

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