Serena Williams has insisted she will ‘soldier on’ in search of slam glory but her quarter-final collapse against Karolina Pliskova posed questions about her emotional state

Serena Williams leaves Melbourne – and the rest of tennis – less certain about her future than her magnificent past, upset yet oddly resigned to the fact that what she hoped would be the extension of her comeback had unravelled in glorious confusion.

In trying to rationalise the disappointment of falling three wins short of drawing alongside Margaret Court with a staggering 24 career majors, Williams moved with far more dexterity in the aftermath than she did while enduring a head-spinning collapse in the third set of her quarter-final against Karolina Pliskova.

“The big picture for me is always winning. I’m not going to sit here and lie about that. It hasn’t happened yet, but I feel like it’s going to happen. Just keep taking it one match at a time, just keep soldiering on, I guess.”

Beaten from 5-1 up in the third set on day 10 of the Australian Open, Williams refused to blame the rolled ankle that plainly hindered her movement after she had landed awkwardly in a foot-fault on the first of four match points that came her way. From that critical moment onwards, she was a sitting duck for the Czech’s searing groundstrokes and pinpoint serves.

What compounded the moment, however, was that but for the foot-fault – called quickly and legitimately – the ball that would have won her the match looked as if it aced Pliskova. But, of course, it did not count. As Williams put it later, they “soldiered on”.

The match would have been over, though. The angst that engulfed her would never have happened. She might have gone on to beat Naomi Osaka in the semi-finals, in a highly anticipated rematch of their 2018 US Open final. Perhaps she would have won the final against either Petra Kvitova or the unseeded American Danielle Collins. And there she would have stood, at last, the equal of Court at the Australian’s home tournament and with the prospect of more victories to come.

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And yet here is the most curious thing: she accepted the line judge’s crushing decision with equanimity. And why might that be? The answer that springs to mind is that the trauma of her meltdown at Flushing Meadows last September, when her anger at the perceived injustice of being penalised for coaching by her mentor, Patrick Mouratoglou, undermined her tennis and led on to the most excruciating postmortems on her behaviour and that of the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos.

Could she subconsciously have been thinking here on Wednesday afternoon: “I do not want to be all over the front pages again for totally losing it. And, anyway, I’m 5-1 up; I’m Serena Williams. I can win this on one leg.” It’s impossible to say, because she flat-batted all inquiries with practised ease.

She acknowledged that her talented Czech opponent – who also beat her in the semi-finals of the 2016 US Open – “played lights out on match point” but added: “I don’t think it had anything to do with my ankle, per se. She was just nailing and hitting shots. Obviously, I made some mistakes …”

Obviously. Like not calling for the trainer which would have grabbed her precious rest time, and maybe eased her pain. Yet she insisted: “I really hate calling the trainer out, to be honest. And at that point I didn’t feel like I needed it or I didn’t feel like it would be a big deal. I like to just kind of tough it out.”

For someone who has played the game to an astonishingly high level for more than two decades, to regard playing injured against an opponent of Pliskova’s ability as no “big deal”, leaves more questions than it answers.

Yet Williams’s game, generally, is in solid shape. She is as fit as she could possibly be 10 months into a comeback after giving birth for the first time aged 36. As Mouratoglou remarked beforehand when asked if her form here was the best he had seen of her since she came back: “I think generally speaking in the tournament, yes. I think she’s fitter than she was last year.”

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He added: “She’s ready physically – emotionally, too, because it’s a big change in anyone’s life to have a baby. She’s back to being Serena on both the physical and emotional side. Her level is good.”

The situation was confused further when Mouratoglou told Eurosport: “She could have asked for the physio because she was hurt but … I don’t know. I think she didn’t call the physio because she knew her tournament was over. Whatever would happen, even playing tomorrow. She knows herself very well, she’s had multiple twisted ankles, very often in her career. Even with a very tight strap she could have tried and kept going eventually winning the match, why not? I don’t think she would have been able to play the day after. I think unconsciously that’s what she thought. That’s the only explanation I can find right now but I haven’t talked to her yet about that. It wasn’t the right moment.”

As she wound up the post-match exchanges, Williams quietly reasserted her ambitions for the rest of her career, at 37 and without a major since winning this one two years ago. “The big picture for me is always winning. I’m not going to sit here and lie about that. It hasn’t happened yet, but I feel like it’s going to happen. Just keep taking it one match at a time, just keep soldiering on, I guess.”

There is nobody in tennis who does not want her to deliver on that promise. It’s just that her anxieties – or, perversely, her efforts to control them – have twice now intruded on her game with big wins in her grasp.