Seven Years Later, a Sabalenka-Osaka Sequel

The two superstars will finally face off at Indian Wells for their first match since a defining classic at the 2018 U.S. Open.

Though the nights are sometimes far too frigid for tennis, Indian Wells reliably reaches perfect temperatures during its day sessions. But as a tournament, the competition takes quite a while to heat up, with two days of qualifying followed by two days without any seeded players.

Thankfully, now that the tournament has reached the middle stages of the main draw, it’s cooking. Even with only half of the third round matches completed, there’s a great platter of fourth round matches on the menu for Tuesday.

On the men’s side, Arthur Fils vs Felix Auger-Aliassime and João Fonseca vs Jannik Sinner should both be crowd pleasers.

On the women’s side, the second-most intriguing match features the fast-rising-and-still-climbing Victoria Mboko against Amanda Anisimova. Mboko was a little-known player ranked 188th this time last year; she’s now slingshotted into the Top 10. Anisimova has also had a fast rise in the past 13 months; I appreciated Courtney Nguyen checking in with Anisimova, through an Alysa Liu lens, in the context of Anisimova’s successfully reupholstered career appearing to fray a bit at times this year.

But the match I am most excited for in the fourth round of Indian Wells is a sequel that required more than seven years of waiting, despite the original being a blockbuster.

With four apiece, Aryna Sabalenka and Naomi Osaka are tied for the most major singles titles of any 90s-born player, man or woman. But on Tuesday, they’ll face off at Indian Wells for just the second time in their careers.

Their only prior meeting was a pivotal one, in the fourth round of the 2018 U.S. Open. Sabalenka, ranked 20th, was surging onto the scene, but Osaka, ranked 19th, was playing with purpose at the majors, and had a bit more big-stage experience.

Here’s an excerpt from my biography of Osaka on that pivotal crossroads for the two future superstars:

An Excerpt from Naomi Osaka

From “Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice” by Ben Rothenberg with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Ben Rothenberg

Naomi’s third-​­round match was even more emphatic than her first two, blanking 33rd-​­ranked Aliaksandra Sasnovich 6–0, 6–0 in just fifty minutes. It was the first “double bagel” Naomi had won since beating sixty-​­five-​year-​­old Gail Falkenberg¹ back in 2013, and it was a loud warning shot to the field about her level before the biggest challenge yet.

There were obvious similarities between Naomi Osaka and her fourth-​round opponent Aryna Sabalenka. Both had climbed from outside the top 70 to inside the top 20 over the course of the season. The tennis world was bullish on the big-​­hitting Belarusian: Sabalenka would be voted WTA Newcomer of the Year at the end of the 2018 season, the same award Naomi had won two years earlier.

Unlike Naomi, who had made her big leap in March at Indian Wells and had come into New York cold, Sabalenka was the red-​­hot player in women’s tennis in the lead‐up to the U.S. Open, reaching the semifinals of Cincinnati and winning her first WTA title at the Connecticut Open in the two weeks before. Since the start of August, Sabalenka had scored five wins against top-​­ten opponents.

Sabalenka had done it all with ferocity; the roaring tiger tattoo on her forearm was an appropriate logo for her primal play. Sabalenka cut a predatory presence on the court, a bruising behemoth who barked bellicosely with every belt of the ball². She was a ball basher in the most beautiful sense of the tennis term, swinging as hard as she possibly could on most every thunderous swing. In order to beat Sabalenka, who was becoming a force of nature in the summer of 2018, Naomi would have to weather the storm.

The match between the two highly touted twenty-​­year-​­olds was the marquee match of the fourth round of the U.S. Open, and the stakes were high. Not only would the winner be into her first major quarterfinal, she would be a heavy favorite to go even further, as they were the only two seeded players remaining in the bottom quarter of the women’s draw.

The roof of Louis Armstrong Stadium, the U.S. Open’s newly rebuilt second stadium, was open for the afternoon match, letting the heat into the stadium unabated. Naomi started hot, too, breaking twice to take the first set 6–3 over Sabalenka in ​­thirty-​­one minutes. But Sabalenka, who had won more matches in the last month than anyone, soon found her range and her confidence, breaking Naomi twice herself to go up 4–1 in the second set. Sabalenka took the second 6–​­2 to force a third after an hour and eleven minutes.

Because of the oppressive heat, there was a ten-​­minute break for both players to cool off indoors before the third set. When they came back, Sabalenka picked up where she had left off, gaining speed like a boulder rolling downhill. Naomi shrieked as she went down break point in the third game, and after Sabalenka pounced on a second serve to break for a 2–​­1 lead, Naomi put a towel over her head and pressed her hands to her face, taking deep breaths.

Sabalenka, who had been the more aggressive, assertive player, seemed to be in full control of the match. But on that changeover, the moment occurred to Naomi: Sabalenka had never won a match on a big stadium at a major; Naomi had. “For once in my life, I actually think that I was the player with more experience, which is very odd for me to say,” Naomi said afterward. “But I know that she just sort of recently started coming onto the Grand Slams and stuff. I feel like there were moments that I kind of knew what to do.”

Sabalenka began to wobble, and Naomi slowly but surely took control. On Naomi’s fourth match point, Sabalenka double faulted, ending the fireworks show from both with a dud. But despite the anticlimax to Naomi’s 6–3, 2–6, 6–4 win there was catharsis. As Sabalenka chucked her racquet to the side, Naomi sobbed softly as she walked to the net. After they shook hands, Naomi sat, covered her face with her towel, and cried some more. She was still fighting back tears when she spoke to on‐court interviewer Andrew Krasny, having finally reached her first major quarterfinal. “I was just thinking I wouldn’t forgive myself if I managed to lose that,” she said.

Naomi was inexperienced at this stage of Grand Slams, but Sascha Bajin had been there many times with Serena. Knowing how prone Naomi was to overthinking, he wanted to get her mind off the tennis. “You can’t escape tennis in New York in August,” Bajin said. “You just can’t. Serena was on every billboard, she was on every TV commercial.” Bajin knew the best way to counteract this was alternate programming. Because her hotel room’s television was incompatible with her PlayStation, Bajin found an electronics store and bought Naomi a new fifty-​­five-​­inch TV, carrying it three blocks through Manhattan back to the hotel. “I wish she was more into books than PlayStation—it would have been easier to carry a few books a couple of blocks than a fifty-​­five-​­inch TV,” Bajin joked. “But, you know, it worked.” After Naomi beat Sabalenka, he called the hotel’s concierge to get the new television set up in Naomi’s room as a surprise for when she returned that night.

And so the night before her first major quarterfinal, Naomi stayed in her hotel room, playing Overwatch on one TV, and watching Serena beat Karolína Plíšková on the other. Their paths were drawing closer, but Naomi still wanted to watch and cheer on her favorite player.

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Where Osaka and Sabalenka Stand Now

Osaka would, of course, go on to win her first major quarterfinal and then win that 2018 U.S. Open title in a controversial final that gained worldwide attention for the conflict between Serena Williams and chair umpire Carlos Ramos. Osaka, launched into global stardom by the triumph in New York, backed it up with a triumph at the next year’s Australian Open that pushed her all the way to the No. 1 spot in the WTA rankings. But after winning her fourth major title at the 2021 Australian Open, Osaka soon started sputtering.

Sabalenka wouldn’t make it to her first major semifinal until Wimbledon in 2021—by which point Osaka had racked up all four of her major singles titles. But once Sabalenka reached that stage for the first time, she’s managed to become a nearly permanent fixture in the business end of majors, reaching semifinals or better at 12 of the last 13 majors she’s played. In fact, Sabalenka has reached as many major semifinals since the start of 2025 as Osaka has in her entire career (five).

There’s a lot of fascinating angles and stakes to a Sabalenka-Osaka match coming right now, both personally and professionally.

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