The 17-year-old has retained the calm, grounded and thoughtful demeanour she's had since her Grand Slam breakthrough at Roland-Garros last year
©️Rèmy Chautard / FFT
- Dan Imhoff
There are days it still surprises Mirra Andreeva that people find her so compelling.
Polite and endearingly honest, the then 16-year-old packed press rooms and captured hearts when she announced herself with a run through qualifying and into the third round on her Grand Slam debut at last year’s Roland-Garros.
With a maiden WTA 1000 quarter-final in Madrid and top 10 wins over Ons Jabeur and Marketa Vondrousova to her name already this year, the results speak for themselves.
Still, the now world No.38 speaks with the same disarming modesty.
In Paris last year, Andreeva considered the greatest difficulty of dealing with success at a young age was staying humble and “to not be a diva”.
Was it any wonder then that people warmed to her charm?
“I don't think that I'm funny,” Andreeva told rolandgarros.com. “But it seems that I am a bit from the interviews that I give. I just speak and I say what I think and people seem to like it, so I will just continue doing the same thing because I really like when people laugh at what I say, so yeah, I guess maybe I'm a bit funny then.”
©Rémy Chautard / FFT
On Saturday, Andreeva booked her third appearance in the second week of a Grand Slam from only her fifth main draw appearance following her 6-2, 6-1 trouncing of Rabat champion Peyton Stearns. It came on the back of a late-night two-and-a-half-hour thriller against 19th seed Victoria Azarenka.
Andreeva became the youngest player to reach the fourth round in Grand Slam tournaments on three surfaces since Anna Kournikova in 1998, having also reached that stage at Wimbledon last season and this year’s Australian Open.
“I didn't know that. I'm happy that I'm the first? Okay, in 26 years. Okay, that's good. I like that,” she grinned.
Little more than a month since her 17th birthday, the Cannes-based Andreeva said as a player she was more stable than a year ago, “tennis-wise, mental-wise, game-wise, everything”.
Despite her profile having steadily grown, off-court she has been able to maintain a refreshingly normal teenage life during that period.
“I didn’t change,” she laughed. “We need to ask some people who've been around me to maybe say if I changed but me, with my feelings, I don't think I've changed something in myself or in my game. Maybe I just became more calm in a way on court and off court and just kind of more straightforward.”
One significant change came during the clay-court swing in April with the appointment of former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez as her coach.
The revered Spaniard, who guided Garbine Muguruza to a Wimbledon title, is an experienced hand and someone whom the teenager has gelled with less than two months into the partnership.
“She always gives me a lot of positive, a lot of great energy,” Andreeva said. “We always have nice atmosphere… So, this helps me a lot, so I like that. Sometimes I don't think a lot about matches, and I'm not nervous. It helps me just to kind of release some tension.”
Renowned for her level-headedness as a player and in her time since as a coach, Martinez, it seems, has already established a balance to keep her young charge on the right track.
©Philippe Montigny / FFT
“Sometimes when I can be a bit grumpy, of course she can say 'move your a**' and just say some stuff that will kind of bring me together and help me to take all my power and my strength to just push myself and play,” she said.
“Sometimes she's very relaxed and we laugh a lot, we talk a lot and at the same time she has kind of boundaries that she can separate tennis – like on court and off court, so I really like that and I really like that on court she's a coach and off court she can be my friend and a good person for me.”
A familiar Cannes-based training partner, Varvara Gracheva, now stands between the teenager and a maiden Grand Slam quarter-final.
While careful not to get too far ahead of herself she left little doubt what would mark a great Roland-Garros for her second time round.
“It would mean everything to go and to win it and of course that is my goal, but I don't know if I will be able to do it,” she said. “I will just… try to be a step closer to the win, but yeah that would be like a perfect moment and perfect timing for me to win a Slam, so I will try to do that.”
