Brought down by a lawn tennis “gangster”.

The unseeded, uninhibited Yulia Putintseva, a Kazakh who once described herself as being like “a gangster on the court and an angel off it”, achieved the greatest victory of her life when she came from a set down to defeat World No.1 Iga Swiatek in the third round of the ladies’ singles. 

This was quite some turnaround on the grass of the No.1 Court, with Putintseva, the World No.35, dropping just three games in the second and third sets for a 3-6, 6-1, 6-2 victory. A gangster move, you might call it. 

For the first time in almost three months, going back to a defeat on a Stuttgart clay court in mid-April, Swiatek has lost a tennis match.

When the Pole took the opening set under the closed roof, it had appeared as though she was going to extend her winning streak which, much like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, has been moving from city to city and generating the kind of numbers you don’t see all that often. From Madrid to Rome to Paris and now London, the Swiftie had won 21 matches in a row.

But, unfortunately for Swiatek, she ran into an opponent who is also on a winning streak of her own, and undefeated on grass this summer, after winning the Birmingham title last month and going on her deepest ever Wimbledon run. Swiatek’s winning run is reset to zero and Putintseva’s moves on to eight. 

“It feels really great. I don’t know how I did it. I was focused on playing fast and not giving her any time and it worked,” said Putintseva, who was feeding off the crowd’s energy. “My coach told me to stay intense in every point. I’ve always been fired up since I was a kid.” 

While Swiatek is such a dominant figure on the Parisian clay – where she won a fourth Roland-Garros title last month – and has also won a US Open crown, she is yet to truly contend for the Venus Rosewater Dish. Her best result on the Wimbledon grass remains reaching the quarter-finals for the first time last summer.

“You know who looks sneakily good? Iga Swiatek looks sneakily good,” Andrea Petkovic, a former top 10 player, had observed before this match. “She’s looking calm and relaxed and is treating grass as if it was clay. Hitting her heavy spin forehands as if she were still in Paris.”

Petkovic and a few others were already talking up Swiatek meeting Jelena Ostapenko, a former Roland-Garros champion and Wimbledon semi-finalist, in the fourth round. But this is where it all ended for Swiatek. 

At the end of the second set, Swiatek left the court, holding a notebook.

Whatever was written on those pages couldn’t stop her from going 0-4 down in the decider, and at that point it appeared as though she was in danger of being bageled – losing a set 6-0 – which is something she has inflicted on others a fair few times on clay courts.

While Swiatek got on the scoreboard in the final set, what she couldn’t do was change the result here.