FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — At 4-2 in the second set, the match was going the way the first had gone. Naomi Osaka was moving cleanly, her first serve hitting targets, her opponent finding nothing. Then she made twenty unforced errors.
The number is almost implausible: four errors in the entire opening set, twenty in the one that followed. Katerina Siniaková, the world’s best doubles player, is not someone who typically comes back from nowhere in singles. She found the gaps. She broke Osaka four consecutive times, took the second set 7-5, and sent the match into a third set it had not looked like reaching.
Osaka walked off the court and into the locker room. She came back out and won the third set 6-1.
“The match was definitely really tough,” Osaka said afterward. “I just felt like I had to fight.”
The 13th seed had looked, for most of the first hour, like someone who knew exactly what she was doing at Flushing Meadows. She has won here twice, in 2018 and again in 2020, and both times she had to navigate adversity that did not appear on the scoreline. Thursday’s second-round match against Siniaková was the same kind: the 6-2, 5-7, 6-1 result reads balanced on paper but the actual match swung wildly in both directions within an hour and forty minutes.
The decisive moment was the bathroom break. Osaka took it after losing the second set. She came back out and broke serve immediately, pushed to 3-0 in the third, and then fended off two break points in the fifth game to make it 4-1. The match closed from there.
“I took the bathroom break, tried to regroup,” Osaka said. “I just told myself that it’s an honor to play on this court.”
That is an unusual thing to say about a court where you have won twice. It is also, in context, exactly right. Osaka has not always treated Arthur Ashe Stadium as a place of comfort. Her 2018 final here, a 6-2, 6-4 win over Serena Williams, was played through crowd hostility that she navigated at 20 years old with a steadiness that belied her age. In 2020, she played each match wearing a mask bearing the name of a Black American killed by police violence. By the time she won the title that year, she had worn seven names in seven matches.
She then stepped back: from tennis, from the public eye, and eventually from competition entirely when she took maternity leave in 2023 to give birth to her daughter, Shai. She returned to the circuit in 2024 and has been building steadily back toward this moment.
The third US Open title would be different from the first two in kind, not just in number. She is 29. She is a mother. The 2018 and 2020 titles arrived when she was still being defined by the sport. This one, if it comes, would arrive on her own terms.
A third title requires beating Elise Mertens next. The Belgian defeated Maria Timofeeva 6-2, 7-6 in her second round and has the kind of consistent, grinding game that tends to punish concentration lapses. Siniaková found Osaka’s second-set drift exploitable. Mertens will look for the same.
As Yahoo Sports reported, Osaka’s Thursday performance followed a tournament-opening fashion moment that drew more coverage than the match itself: she entered the US Open in an outfit she described as Allen Iverson-inspired. “For me he’s a trailblazer,” she said of Iverson. “He’s shifted the way NBA players dress.” The clothes moved the conversation before the matches did.
The 2026 US Open draw has organized itself around multiple competing narratives. Coco Gauff’s title defense carries the ranking stakes: a second US Open title could deliver the world No. 1 ranking she has never held. Novak Djokovic’s first-round exit, his first at a Grand Slam in twenty years, remade the conversation on the men’s side entirely. Osaka’s path to a third women’s title runs through a draw that is still sorting itself out.
She is not the favorite. She was not the favorite in 2018 either, and that match is the one people still replay.
The second set on Thursday was not pleasant to watch, and it will not feature in any highlight package Osaka reviews. Twenty errors from 4-2 up is a concentration problem, or a physical one, or something harder to name, the kind of middle-match drift that ends careers or fortifies them, depending on what comes after.
What came after was 6-1 in thirty minutes.
Osaka next plays Mertens. The second set will be forgotten by the first game.
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