Mother of two Tatjana Maria beats Amanda Anisimova to win Queen’s title
As the world’s leading women returned to Queen’s Club for the first time since 1973, it felt appropriate that one of the oldest players on the tour – 37-year-old Tatjana Maria – should have claimed the title on Sunday.
Maria eschews the power game favoured by the likes of world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka and top Queen’s seed Qinwen Zheng. Instead she offered a throwback to the delicacy and guile of wooden rackets as she outwitted Amanda Anisimova by a 6-3, 6-4 scoreline.
Backing up her slice-heavy ground-strokes with some razor-sharp serving, Maria earned seven aces through perfect placement rather than speed. Her two daughters – 11-year-old Charlotte and four-year-old Cecilia – watched from the sidelines alongside her husband and coach Charles-Edouard Maria.
“It means a lot to me, because I’m 37 years old and I won this trophy today,” said the German, who was still in a state of disbelief when she entered the interview room. “In the past, people were always saying, ‘you’re too old’, but actually I’m a good example that even at my age, you can still win big trophies.”
If the bookmakers had drawn up their odds on ranking alone, Maria – who began this week at No 86 in the world – would have started as the 22nd favourite among the 28 women in the draw. But she has always been something of a grass-court specialist, with a tour-level win-rate of 61 per cent on the lawns, as opposed to just 40 per cent on hard courts and 42 on clay. Only three years ago, she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals.
The explanation lies in her wonderful hand skills, which kept the clunkier Anisimova off balance throughout Sunday’s final. The best ploy on grass is to play the ball low over the net, making it skid off the lush surface, and Maria does that brilliantly.
“I’m super proud of myself that I could win this tournament, because I always believed, and my husband too,” said Maria. “That’s why we kept going, because there was always this belief that I could win big tournaments and do great things on the tour, so I’m really, really proud of this.”
Maria thus became the first woman to triumph at Queen’s Club since Olga Morozova, the Russian who won the title in 1973 and would reach the Wimbledon final the following year before being blitzed by a 19-year-old Chris Evert.
In the 1990s, Morozova went on to be hired by the Lawn Tennis Association. She relocated from Russia to the home counties, where she worked at the LTA’s then headquarters at Bisham Abbey and oversaw the development of numerous players including Andy Murray – whose name now decorates the main court at Queen’s Club – and Laura Robson.
Returning to Maria, she will now climb to No 43 in the world, exactly halving her ranking. She has just claimed the biggest title of her career and with it the first prize of around £161,000, out of a total prize fund of £1m.
Maria also became the oldest WTA singles champion in five years. We haven’t seen anything like this since Serena Williams – another mother who returned to the tour after maternity leave – won in Auckland at the age of 38.
Mother and daughter double act?
Maria has no plans to stop yet, however. Her biggest ambition is to form a doubles partnership with her daughter Charlotte. “She will turn 12 at the end of the year,” said Maria, “and you can start to play on tour when you’re 14. So I have a few more years to go, but it would be really my goal to do this.
“She’s on tour since she’s three months old, actually. It’s her dream. And if my body holds, if I really enjoy to play tennis, I would love to keep going and to play the doubles with her.”
In its unexpectedness, Maria’s success continues a theme of unpredictability across recent grass-court events on the WTA Tour. While five men have dominated the Wimbledon honours boards of late, collecting 21 straight titles between them, there has been no discernible pattern on the women’s side, with eight different champions in eight years since Williams’s last victory in 2016.
As for the return of women’s matches to Queen’s Club in south-west London, the LTA reported some satisfying figures. The last three days were sell-outs, while overall ticket sales stood at 62,000 – around 88 per cent of capacity.
Only two standalone WTA events have delivered higher overall attendances in the past year. One was in Charleston, South Carolina, while the other was the Canadian Open, most recently held in Toronto.
One more imponderable remains to be tested, and that is how well the grass courts hold up throughout the men’s event, which starts in earnest on Monday. The early omens are encouraging. After a week of intensive use, the amount of visible wear remains within reasonable limits.
