Australian Open 2022: Horror draw for Ash Barty? Soft draw? Here’s a shock – it’s just a draw

It’s not a great draw for Ash Barty at the Australian Open, nor is it a shocker. The one certainty is that she doesn’t have 127 opponents. She only has seven.

Ash Barty at Melbourne Park on Thursday ahead of the Australian Open draw Picture: Getty Images

Ash Barty is one of 128 players ­trying to win the Australian Open. The size of the field can make the task seem as daunting as standing on the starting line for an Olympic marathon and seeing the caliber and sheer number of the rivals around you. How to get past them all?

Tennis tournaments are less intimidating because you don’t have to beat the entire field. Of Barty’s 127 nemeses at Melbourne Park, she only has to worry about seven of them.

The temptation each year, upon the release of the Open road map, is to ascribe to Barty either a horror or soft draw. They’re both eye-catching headlines and a way to whip up a bit of interest. Sometimes, however, the shock is that it’s just a regular old draw.

Not especially tough, not particularly easy, just a run-of-the-mill path that reveals a few respectable players Barty will have to beat to win the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup. The forgotten ­element here is that you don’t get horror draws when you’re the world No.1. You are the horror draw.

Barty’s jig to the final is likely to have the following souls of varying capabilities on the other side of the net. Round 1, qualifier. Never an opponent to strike fear into the heart. Round 2, Russia’s world No.79 Varvara Gracheva. Only marginally more dangerous than qualifier. Round 3, Italy’s 30th-seeded Camila Giorgi. A lively yet inconsistent sort. Round 4, this is where it gets interesting. Probably defending champion Naomi Osaka. But Osaka will have her hands full with Olympic champion Belinda Bencic in the preceding round. Quarter-finals, Greece’s fifth-seeded Maria Sakkari, who’s never won a major. Semi-finals, fourth-seeded Czech and French Open champion Barbora Krejci­kova, whom Barty cleaned up at Wimbledon last year.

Of course, there’s folly in this report. Not all results will follow the form book, and so not all of the seeds in Barty’s section are guaranteed to get through. She may reach the final and, as she did at the French Open in 2019, look at the opposite baseline and think bloody hell, it’s Marketa Vondrousova. The beauty of the structure of a tennis draw for Barty? A whopping 64 players can be forgotten about until you reach the final.

The other half of the draw doesn’t exist, then. They knock each other out until only one of them gets to the decider. On the opposite side to Barty at Melbourne Park are Aryna Sabalenka, Garbine Muguruza, Iga Swiatek, Simona Halep, Petra Kvitova, Goco Gauff, Angelique Kerber, Sloane Stephens, Elena Rybakina and Emma Raducanu. Serious players. Yet Barty doesn’t have to beat all of them. Not even most. All but one will be eliminated without her needing to lift a finger.

It reminds me of an interview with 11-times world surfing champion Kelly Slater, and his approach to winning events that followed the same round-by-round format as tennis tournaments.

“All I care about is what’s in front of my face,” Slater said. “Every world title race is broken down into events. And every event is broken down into heats. All I have to do is win a heat. That’s it. My next heat. There’s only one other guy in that heat, and all I have to do is beat him. I can handle that. The thought of beating all these guys freaks me out.

“There’s a lot of dangerous ­people in a draw and it can be overwhelming if you put them all ­together and wonder how you can win against them.

“Because I don’t know if I can beat them all. But I’ve realised I don’t have to. I just have beat one other guy in one heat. Win enough heats, you’re in the final. Win that heat, you get the trophy. That seems doable.”

To win a tournament stacked with talent – Sabalenka, Muguruza, Osaka, Swiatek, Krejcikova, Bencic, Kvitova, Kerber and Gauff, for starters – sounds a tall order for Barty.

But when it’s broken down to the most basic level, she doesn’t need to play the best tennis of the tournament. She just needs to play the best tennis of the match she’s in. That’s doable. A manageable self-expectation.