Maria Sakkari fought through a rough opening and a second-set hole to reach the Roland Garros third round for the first time in five years. The 30-year-old rallied past American qualifier Claire Liu 6-7, 6-3, 6-3 on Thursday, turning a match that had slipped away early into one that ended with her on the winning side of the big points.
The result mattered because Sakkari had not been this deep at the French Open since her 2021 run to the semifinals. She also made the turnaround at the right moment: after losing the first-set tiebreak 9-7 despite holding a set point, she fell behind 0-3 in the second before taking control and leveling the match with a 6-3 set.
That made the third set feel less like a final stanza than a test of whether she could keep the momentum she had built. Sakkari did exactly that, taking the set 6-3 and booking a meeting with Polish qualifier Maja Chwalińska, who is set for a Roland Garros test against Maria Sakkari at 11:00.
The win carried extra weight because it came on a day when Stefanos Tsitsipas, whose path had opened up after several top contenders had already gone out and after the top seed Jannik Sinner was eliminated earlier in the tournament, lost his own match to Matteo Arnaldi. Tsitsipas dropped a four-setter 7-6, 5-7, 6-3, 6-2 and needed a medical timeout for a groin issue in the third set, a setback that left one Greek player moving on and the other heading out.
Arnaldi’s victory over Tsitsipas was his first career win against the fifth seed, and it sent him into a third-round meeting with Raphaël Collignon. For Sakkari, though, the night belonged to a different kind of statement: after five years without a French Open third-round appearance, she found a way back there by refusing to let a 0-3 deficit turn into a lost cause.
