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Several tennis fans on the internet reacted to Brazil's Beatriz Haddad Maia coming through the longest match of the 2024 season so far.
Maia defeated Poland's Magda Linette 7-6(6), 6-7(1), 6-1 on Wednesday, February 7, to book her quarterfinal berth at the Abu Dhabi Open 2024. The match was a grueling three hour and 44 minute long battle.
This was Haddad Maia's 11th match since January 2022 that went past the three-hour mark. She had also topped the list of longest matches in 2023 courtesy her French Open fourth-round win over Spain's Sara Sorribes Tormo, which took three hours and 51 minutes.
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The Brazilian's latest victory hilariously prompted one of the tennis fans on X (formerly Twitter) to create a fake alert. The fan claimed that the WTA had decided to prohibit Haddad Maia from competing in a bid to solve the problem of late finishes.
"BREAKING: The WTA Tour has announced that to prevent congested scheduling and matches being pushed into unplanned late-night finishes, Beatriz Haddad Maia is to be banned from all its forthcoming tournaments," the fan wrote.
Another fan took a dig at critics of women's tennis, writing:
"Women’s matches should be longer, they say."
Here are a few more reactions:
Beatriz Haddad Maia: "I never give up and I always try one more time"
After her win over Magda Linette, Beatriz Haddad Maia joked about giving her team a hard time with her long battles on the court.
"I think my team need to take care of their hearts," she said in the on-court interview on Wednesday.
Haddad Maia and Linette broke each other's serve once each in the opening set, but the former was able to edge ahead in the tiebreak. They canceled each other's breaks in the second set as well to play another tiebreak. This time, however, Linette cruised home 7-1.
In the interview, Maia suggested that feeling agitated in the tiebreak cost her the set.
"Sometimes tennis, it's not easy to manage the emotions. In the tiebreak I was a little bit frustrated, and that caused another set," she said.
The Brazilian further affirmed that she never gives up.
"But there is one quality for me that is very important, and it's that I never give up and I always try one more time," the sixth seed added.
Beatriz Haddad Maia will take on either Ons Jabeur or Emma Raducanu in the quarterfinals of the Abu Dhabi Open 2024.
