Naomi Osaka wants to “play with the big dogs” as she continues a stop-start comeback from having a baby and injury problems which have hampered her season so far.
Osaka fought back from a set and a break down in her Miami Open first-round match to win 3-6, 6-4, 6-3 against Ukrainian qualifier Yuliia Starodubtseva.
It was a first win for the former Miami runner-up since January, after she was forced to retire with an injury at the Australian Open.
"I want to play with the big dogs so bad, and I just see everyone playing so well, and I want to do the same," she said after the testing first-round encounter. "But I have to remember it's a process."
Osaka enjoyed a brilliant start to the year, reaching the final in Auckland at the very start of January, but was left frustrated by an abdominal issue.
She was up a set in the final when she could no longer continue, conceding victory to Denmark’s Clara Tauson, and the same injury was behind her retirement at Melbourne Park when trailing by a set to Belinda Bencic - another player to come back from giving birth in recent years.
Since then the former world No 1 has failed to win a match, crashing out in the first round at Indian Wells to Colombia’s Camila Osorio, who had never won a main-draw match at the Californian tournament before. Osaka described that loss as “the worst match I’ve ever played” in a blunt social media post afterwards, but said after her Miami victory that she had learned a lesson from that bruising defeat.
"I knew that I wasn't playing too well, but I thought, let me try to stay on the court as long as possible, because I consider Miami my home," she said in her on-court interview.
"[In Indian Wells] I was just over-hitting a lot, so I tried to use my legs. I was going to run into every corner if I had to, and we were going to have to play for three hours if she was going to beat me."
Ultimately she needed two hours and 28 minutes to see off Starodubtseva, with her reward a tie with the 24th seed, Liudmila Samsonova.
