MELBOURNE, Australia — Some curses are invisible. Some curses are spoken. And other curses are bright blue with painted white lines, and the word MELBOURNE emblazoned in capital letters.
Mirra Andreeva’s Australian Open curse looks something like the last one. Speaking after a tense, at-times excruciating three-set win over Moyuka Uchijima which went to a match tiebreak, the top-ranked teenager on the WTA Tour said that Court 3 at Melbourne Park is “cursed.”
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“The only thing that I had in my mind is this court is cursed and I don’t want to play on that court again,” she said in her news conference.
“I just had the thought that this stupid court, it’s all because of this court.”
If Court 3 is cursed, Andreeva has twice broken its spell. At the 2023 Australian Open, Andreeva, then 16, served notice of her talent for tennis and exorcising demons in a third-round match against Diane Parry of France. She lost the first set 6-1. She won the second. She went 5-1 down. She got back to 6-5. She got pulled back to 6-6. After all the ups and downs, she won a match tiebreak. On Wednesday against Uchijima, a year older, considerably wiser and inside the WTA top 20, she had to break out her talent for the supernatural again.
Having led the match tiebreak 6-3, the curse started to take hold. 6-5 up after two solid points from Uchijima on serve, Andreeva eased forward ready to put away an easy volley for a 7-5 lead. Instead, the ball floated long as if carried by an invisible hand. The next point, she missed a basic forehand and before she knew it she was 6-8 down. Andreeva needed to find something.
“I just tried to, you know, forget about this and play every point,” she said. Fortunately for her, the curse of Court 3 gripped Uchijima, just as it had done when she served for the match at 5-4 and hit a double fault and three unforced errors. A regulation forehand looped long, and from then Andreeva took over her own destiny, extracting three errors, one with a serve and two with powerful groundstrokes, to move on to a meeting with No. 23 seed Magdalena Frech.
She had lifted the curse, but not without giving her coach Conchita Martinez a fright, Andreeva said.
“I’m not going to exactly say what she said because I think people would really not like it.
“She just said, God. She was a bit pissed at me because she said she was very nervous … The first word was a bit not, you know, the best. I cannot say it right here.”
Curses come in all shapes and sizes.
(Fred Lee / Getty Images)
