Osaka defeated 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (5) by Amanda AnisimovaJapanese player had two match points in final setIn months and years gone by, a third-round grand-slam loss to an unheralded opponent might have given Naomi Osaka cause for heavy rumination. She may have agonised over every headline and carried every morsel of feedback into her next game.
After falling on Friday to the unseeded
American Amanda Anisimova, she will still uninstall
Instagram and
Twitter from her phone and “probably won’t redownload it for a couple of weeks”. But something has also fundamentally changed for Osaka in the time since she withdrew from last year’s
French Open to prioritise her mental health, opted out of
Wimbledon and then endured several months more of indecision around her career.