The 2024 tennis season was filled with noteworthy stories, breakthrough moments, and countless trophy lifts. But what were the best matches of the year that was?
We rolled the tape, and this week, TENNIS.com is counting down some of the best WTA matches of the past year (with our ATP picks to come next week). Our countdown continues with the top comebacks of the year. Down but never out, these women showed that a match was never over until the umpire said, “Game, set and match.”
One year removed from losing an epic junior final at Melbourne Park to her fellow wunderkind Alina Korneeva in three hours and 18 minutes, Mirra Andreeva had something even more special in store for her Australian Open main-draw debut.
After crushing Ons Jabeur inside Rod Laver Arena in the second round, hammering the three-time Grand Slam finalist with the loss of just two games, the then-16-year-old found herself opposite another one-time junior prodigy in France’s Parry, who herself scored an upset against a seeded player and was into the Australian Open third round for the first time.
Fans would’ve been forgiven for thinking that Andreeva, who beat Parry at Roland Garros less than 12 months earlier 6-1, 6-2, would coast into the second week ahead of the Court 3 clash. But instead, they were treated to a see-saw affair for the first hour-plus, with a dramatic third frame that had more than enough action to make up for it.
Parry not only served for the win twice — and had a match point on Andreeva’s serve at 5-2, 30-40 — before Andreeva won five games in a row and failed to serve out the match herself. But she eventually dominated the ensuing decisive tiebreak to escape, and reach the last 16.
Read the match report: Down 5-1 in the third set, Andreeva rockets into 2024 Australian Open fourth round
“I would prefer to win in straight sets. I think everybody would,” Andreeva said afterwards, “But it’s also good to win when you’re fighting for every point. I think I will have a lot of matches like this in my career. I’m just happy with the win. I don’t care how I win exactly with the score and the time, I just want to win.”
Despite letting her emotions get the better of her while spiraling to a deficit, Andreeva’s eventual fortitude caught the attention of her self-described “idol,” Andy Murray, who authored a post on X, formerly Twitter, praising the teenager’s mental strength.
Read more: Mirra Andreeva did, in fact, put Andy Murray’s famous complimentary tweet in a frame
This wasn’t the first epic match from the teenager’s racquet in 2024, and it certainly seems likely that it won’t be the last.
Elena Rybakina had every reason to be wary of facing her fellow Russian-born Kazakh Yulia Putintseva ahead of facing her in the quarterfinals of the Mutua Madrid Open.
The 2022 Wimbledon champion, riding a seven-match clay-court winning streak after storming to the title at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, had never beaten Putintseva in two previous meetings, and the latter was riding high at the Caja Magic after upsetting No. 6 Zheng Qinwen and No. 10 Daria Kasatkina, en route to the last eight. And the elder of the two compatriots showed the kind of clay-court prowess that’s taken her to two quarterfinals at Roland Garros in her career over nearly two-and-a-half hours on Court Manolo Santana.
But despite multiple leads, Putintseva couldn’t land the finishing blow. Not once, but twice, Rybakina escaped a deficit to reach her first semifinal in Madrid: Down a set and a break, she pushed the match to a decider, and later rallied from 5-2 behind in the final fame. She saved two match points serving down 15-40 at 5-2, and never lost another game in a 4-6, 7-6(4), 7-5 victory.
“It was not easy to keep coming back and pushing through, but at 5-2, I already left all the emotions and frustrations to just keep playing,” Rybakina confessed post-match. “The momentum shifted, Yulia started to be a little bit more angry and some mistakes helped me.”
But the Madrid setback didn’t derail the rest of Putintseva’s year, however. She went on to have a statement grass-court season, winning her third career WTA singles title in Birmingham and upsetting then-world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the third round of Wimbledon.
Rybakina, meanwhile, got a taste of her own medicine in the next round. Up a set and a break on Aryna Sabalenka, and two points away from victory when she served for the match in the second set, she eventually lost a 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(5) thriller.
Sometimes, a great player doesn’t only need to overcome an in-form opponent to stave off defeat. They also need to battle outside elements, like weather, or their own bodies.
Aryna Sabalenka did all that and more when she faced off against two-time tournament champion Elina Svitolina at the Internazionali BNL d’Italia. In a fourth-round match that finished near 1 a.m. at the Foro Italico, Sabalenka came from 2-0 down in the third set .
Facing Svitolina for the first time in almost a year, in a recently-fraught head-to-head, the second seed looked like she’d reset well with a dominant 6-1 second-set performance. But, after a lengthy medical timeout where she got her lower back and hip area attended to, Sabalenka struggled to get herself to full power, and found herself down 2-0 early in the third.
Plan B, activate. With three clean drop-shot winners, Sabalenka broke serve and eventually leveled the set at 2-2. Later, when facing two of the match points at 15-40 down 6-5, it was her defense at the back of the court that drew her even. Svitolina missed a forehand return on her third chance to win the match, at 7-6 in the breaker, and two points later, Sabalenka final forehand proved too tough for Svitolina to handle.
“I was thinking it’s a challenge to fight through whatever I had on the court,” Sabalenka said afterwards, “and if I’m able to fight through it then I’m a really strong person. I’m really proud of myself today.”
After two years’ worth of consistency at the top of women’s tennis, Jessica Pegula found herself reeling, physically and mentally, in the early months of 2024.
After a second-round loss at the Australian Open, she split with her longtime coach David Witt, and two major injuries left her sidelined for months: A neck problem forced her out of February’s tour through the Middle East, and she missed the entire red-clay spring with a rib issue. Her late-season revival, anchored by a second straight WTA 1000 win in Canada and a run to the US Open final, and candor about the road to get there, was one of the feel-good stories of the year’s second half.
Read more: Mark Knowles, co-coach of Jessica Pegula, had a great feeling before her US Open
But before that, an all-time escape earned her a fifth career WTA singles title at Berlin’s ecotrans Ladies Open. The fourth-seeded American saved five championship points, all on her serve in the third set, .
Playing her way into form, Pegula first navigated multiple rain delays throughout the week, including a postponement of her semifinal against Coco Gauff while she was ahead by a set and 3-1 in the second-set tiebreak. Pegula finished that win off on Sunday morning ahead of the final by winning four of the five points played.
She had leads of 3-0, 4-2 and 5-3 in the first set before being blanked in the tiebreak, and later, came from 4-1 down in the second set as her Houdini act began.
It was one of two WTA finals in which the winner saved championship points. The other? Swiatek’s thrilling triumph against Sabalenka in Madrid.
While she never personally perscribed to them, the chorus of voices calling Coco Gauff’s 2024 season a disappointment were growing louder after the American was bundled out of her US Open title defense by Emma Navarro, 19 double faults and all.
But erasing a deficit against Paula Badosa for the second time in 2024 was a key in Gauff changing the narrative by year’s end.
When the American arrived in Beijing in September for the WTA 1000 China Open, she was downplaying expectations for the final weeks of her season. Days earlier, she and Brad Gilbert parted ways after a year-plus as player and coach, and she added Matt Daly to her team. She said she was treating the event like a “practice” week, and whatever good things were to come were a bonus.
While Gauff’s form wasn’t at its peak in the early rounds in Beijing, her fight certainly was. After coming from a set down to defeat Naomi Osaka (by retirement) and surprise quarterfinalist Yuliia Starodubtseva, Gauff stood opposite former world No. 2 Badosa for a second time in 2024 for a spot in the final.
And after having defeated Badosa from a set behind in Rome in the spring, the fall reprise was even more impressive. From 6-4, 4-2 down, Gauff won 10 of 12 games to score her 20th WTA 1000 victory of the year, setting a new single-season personal best for match wins at that level in her young career.
Read more: How Coco Gauff competed her way out of a slump, and finished back at her best, in Beijing
After the 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 triumph, she revealed a mantra that was applicable for her run through the tournament.
“I always grew up on the philosophy that the second set is the most important set, which it is because you either win the match or you stay in the match with that set,” Gauff told press. “I’d rather be able to raise my level in the second set than kind of crash after the first.”
Everyone knows what happened next: Gauff went on to rout Karolina Muchova 6-1, 6-3 to win the title, the first American to win the China Open singles title since Serena Williams in 2013, and used that confidence as a year-end springboard to be crowned the WTA Finals champion.
