Jabeur carves a trail to become first Arab grand-slam finalist

There has never been an Arab player in a grand-slam final. No African woman has reached a grand-slam final in the open era. But on Saturday, the first day of Eid, Ons Jabeur, the world No 2 from Tunisia, will play for the women’s singles title on Centre Court, an arena she has decorated this fortnight with guile and grace, spin and slice, artistry and class.

Jabeur plays tennis in a different way to anyone else.

She wields her racket like a wand, not a weapon. Her winners swoon to a stop as often as they shoot past. She is a pioneer who would rather carve a trail than blaze one.

“I want to see more players from my country, from the Middle East, from Africa,” Jabeur said. “I think we didn’t believe enough that we can do it. Now I’m just trying to show that. Hopefully, people are getting inspired.”

To reach the match of her life, Jabeur overcame one of her closest friends, Tatjana Maria, the unseeded 34-year-old German mother-of-two. Maria played a full part in a compelling semi-final, and if much of the talk before had focused on how Jabeur would cope with the psychological challenge of playing one of her nearest and dearest, she was soon engaged in the more pressing business of chasing balls into corners and trying to get underneath a slice perhaps even lower and more lethal than her own.

The opportunity before both players was enormous, with neither having even reached a major semi-final before.

Jabeur settled more quickly, and although Maria staved off three break points in her first service game, a brilliantly constructed point from Jabeur, using the whole depth and breadth of the court, earned another opportunity in her next return game, which she took when Maria netted a backhand. Jabeur broke again at 4-2 in a game in which she produced one of the shots of the tournament, a pirouetting pick-up volley that landed the ball a couple of inches the other side of the net, and when she sealed the set 6-2 it seemed her superiority in the rankings would be reflected in the result.

Instead, Maria came back superbly in the second set. The sheer geometric variety of the rallies was mesmerising, with both players producing imaginative fades and dinks, slices that swooped low over the belly of the net like paper planes and angular net exchanges that had the thrust and counter-thrust of a fencing joust.

But it was Maria’s slice that gradually began to gain the ascendancy, frustrating Jabeur into errors from the back of the court, and in a reversal of the first set, the German broke twice to win it 6-3 and force a decider.

At the end of the match, the two players shared a warm, lingering hug at the net, and Jabeur dragged Maria back to the centre of the court to bask in the warmth of the crowd’s applause. “I wanted to share that moment with her at the end because she’s such an inspiration for so many players, including me,” Jabeur said. She made sure her friend got her day in the sun; now her own focus, and that of the Arab world turns to one last duel in the sun.