'Free-flowing' on grass at last, Osaka reaches first Wimbledon fourth round

LONDON -- No. 14 seed Naomi Osaka completed her career set of Grand Slam second-week showings in emphatic fashion on Friday, defeating Daria Kasatkina 6-1, 6-3 in just 65 minutes to reach the Wimbledon fourth round for the first time.

Osaka has now made the fourth round at least once at each major, and nine times in total: three times at the Australian Open (including two titles), once at Roland Garros, once at Wimbledon and four times at the US Open (including two titles). She is the 31st currently active player to accomplish this feat.

Osaka was up against one of those players -- former No. 8 Kasatkina, a Wimbledon quarterfinalist in 2018, completed her set by reaching the 2025 Australian Open fourth round. This was the first meeting on grass between the two 1997-born rivals, and it followed the pattern previously set on hard and clay courts: Osaka now leads the head-to-head 4-0, and 8-1 in sets.

The former World No. 1 dominated with her power to take a 6-1, 3-1 lead, dropping just five points on serve in the first set. With her back to the wall, Kasatkina began to extend the rallies and make an impact with her forehand -- and one terrific lob -- to peg Osaka back to 3-3. But she was unable to sustain that momentum: Osaka came through a three-deuce tussle to break again for 4-3, and cruised to victory from there. 

Osaka learns to be "free-flowing" on grass

Osaka's grass-court breakthrough might seem overdue. She showed early promise on the surface, reaching the 2015 Surbiton ITF W50 final -- via wins over Anett Kontaveit and Hsieh Su-Wei in her first tournament on it; she made the Wimbledon third round in each of her first two main-draw appearances, in 2017 and 2018.

But after the second of those, it took Osaka eight years to take the next step -- which has come one week after reaching her first grass-court final in Bad Homburg. She ascribes her improved understanding of the surface to coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, with whom she is playing her first grass-court season.

"I would say he challenges me a lot to think outside the box," Osaka said. "We were doing a lot of things on the hard court -- because where I train, they don't have a grass court -- we were just doing a lot of different things. It's kind of made me understand grass-court tennis a lot more. I think when I was younger, I was a little bit more stubborn on how I wanted to play on this surface, but I realize it's a lot more free-flowing.

"Tomasz is doing a lot of really weird drills that [mean] I have to come forward. I was never one that was too comfortable coming forward. It forced me to see the ball, or see the speed of the ball. It's just a bunch of different training drills that made my mind more aware of the depth of the ball and things like that."

Osaka will get a chance to test her newfound grass-court confidence further against either No. 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka or former Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko.