By Dan Marsh Shane Ireland
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova was visibly upset over a significant technical glitch during her Wimbledon match against Sonay Kartal, accusing the line calling system of ‘stealing’ a point from her. The contentious moment happened during the first set of their women’s fourth round encounter, with the score evenly poised at 4-4. Kartal hit a ball which appeared clearly out, yet it went uncalled, preventing Pavlyuchenkova from securing the game. Following a decision to replay the point, the Brit Kartal proceeded to break serve, deepening Pavlyuchenkova’s frustration, who vented to chair umpire Nico Helwerth at the next interval. Clearly agitated, the world No.50 caught voicing her doubts: “I don’t know if it’s in or it’s out. How do I know? How can you prove it? Because she is local, they can say whatever. You took the game away from me.” Helwerth countered with a defence of the system: “I have to trust the system. If they tell me it’s up and running there’s nothing we can do. That’s the rule unfortunately.” Still irate, Pavlyuchenkova continued: “They stole a game from me. They stole it.” Despite the disruption, which prompted a considerable delay, Pavlyuchenkova rallied to take a 6-5 lead as she sought to secure the first set. Kartal responded by holding her serve, pushing the set towards a tie-break, reports the Mirror . Dual Grand Slam champion Tracey Austin highlighted Pavlyuchenkova’s dilemma following the error, focusing on the mental challenge of overcoming such an incident. “That is rough for Pavlyuchenkova,” she remarked on BBC Sport commentary. “Now you have the job of trying to compose yourself when you know that you should have been a game up. “This is a mountain to overcome mentally.” Yet, Pavlyuchenkova managed to surmount this challenge, securing the first set tie-break 7-3 and taking the lead in her match against Britain’s No 3. The introduction of automated line calls at Wimbledon has been met with mixed reactions, and it follows an incident on Centre Court when Emma Raducanu said the technology made mistakes in her third-round loss to Aryna Sabalenka. “Yeah, I mean, that call [against Sabalenka] was, like, for sure out,” Raducanu said in her post-match press conference. “It’s kind of disappointing, the tournament here, that the calls can be so wrong. “For the most part they’ve been okay. It’s just, like, I’ve had a few in my other matches, too, that have been very wrong. So yeah, I don’t know. Hopefully they can kind of fix that.”