The shot that generated the most buzz, however, was played during practice: Barty casually tucked the tennis ball off her hip, a textbook leg glance, pointed elbow and all.
“It was a sweet little glance, wasn’t it?” laughs Andy Richards, cricket coach, proud Queenslander and a “fairweather tennis fan”. Richards, who trained Barty during her brief switch to cricket, gushes over his ward’s exploits at the Melbourne Park
“She’s looked awesome. I think just in the last couple of years, she’s got so much more mature,” Richards says on the phone, minutes before the start of the final, from his Brisbane home where he’s putting out “beverages” for friends who’d come over to watch history being made. “Whatever happens, Australia is excited for her. We tend to put a fair bit of pressure on our people… I just think people will be happy for her because she’s just a genuine, really good human being. We have people all across the world that get a bit taken aback as to how she presents herself. And I can tell you from experience that how she presents is exactly how she is.”
“An 18-year-old with the maturity of a 30-year-old” was Richards’ first impression of Barty.
It was 2015, and Barty was a doubles contender (she reached three Grand Slam finals) and a singles’ prospect, when she walked away from a sport she had been playing since she was 4. Exhausted with the rigours of the Tour, she did not seek a protected ranking, but didn’t throw away her racquets either. Barty was coaching kids when she was invited to speak at the national women’s cricket team dinner.
There, she told Queensland cricketers Jess Jonassen, Delissa Kimmince and Beth Mooney: “I really wouldn’t mind giving cricket a go.”
“She’d never played the game, except for some backyard cricket. And during that first hit, she was probably already better than the bottom third of my squad. I asked her if she would like to come and train and she said no, not until she’d had another four or five hits,” says Richards. “She didn’t want to embarrass herself. She also didn’t want to put anybody out.”
Barty soon earned the spot. The next challenge was to earn camaraderie.
“Fitting into such a competitive environment is not always easy. The girls are not always necessarily accepting of people coming in from outside. A couple of our girls had a fair bit of friendly banter with Ash, and she gave back as much as she got. It seemed like she had been with the team for years. That’s not an easy thing to do in a group of competitive sporting women. But she did it seamlessly.”
Barty, expectedly, was “a coach’s dream”.
“An extraordinarily talented woman, her hand-eye coordination is as good as I’ve seen from a crossover sport point of view. Elite athletes like her have awareness about where their body needs to be, to execute their skill,” says Richards, who has also worked with Pakistan women’s team as an assistant coach and batting consultant.
A cursory glance at Barty’s game is enough to reveal why she was able to transfer her skills from the court to the pitch. How the 5’5 all-courter goes toe-to-toe with stronger specimens, getting on top of the bounce to ‘flat bat’ the forehand. How she bends and picks the ball with a double backhand, sometimes on the half-volley, and powers it deep cross-court.
“Obviously, the cow corner, sort of wide mid-on was a strength. But for me, it was her ability to play straight. At the back end of that first session, I said ‘I just want you to hit them as hard as you can as straight as you can’. Immediately, she got her body in position. Clearing the front leg and hitting it straight.”
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