Paris (AFP)

For her very first match at Roland Garros at 19, the French Clara Burel qualified in the heart of the Parisian night for the second round by defeating the Dutch Arantxa Rus (67th) in three sets 6-7 ( 7/9), 7-6 (7/2), 6-3.

With a match point won at 00:10, the ex-N.1 world juniors, 357th in the WTA standings, won the latest match ever to be completed at Roland Garros, of which twelve of the fourteen courts have lighting for the first times this year, which avoids the interruption of matches due to lack of light.

It is also the first success of his young Grand Slam career.

"I just saw that it was almost 1am, I didn't realize during the match that it was so late, I thought it was 9pm or 10pm, it was a bit of a surprise ", smiled Burel at a press conference.

"I never started a game when it was already dark like this," she continued.

The young Rennaise initially led 5-2 in the first set, before yielding to the decisive game.

There followed a marathon of nearly three hours (2h57), contested in front of a handful of night owl spectators bundled up, under the stars and in the cool Parisian autumn.

The two players exchanged breaks throughout the three sets: eighteen in total, ten in favor of Burel and eight for Rus, on court N.7 backing onto court Philippe-Chatrier, where the matches were over long ago. lurette.

Once the match point was pocketed, the young Frenchwoman fell into her mother's arms for long seconds.

- Wrist operated in 2019 -

"At the end, when I saw my mother, I thought back to last year when I was watching Roland Garros and I had just had an operation on my (left) wrist, it was difficult. When I was I won, I thought about it all, it was a lot of emotion, "she said.

"I'm super tired, but obviously there is excitement after this game," she added.

In the next round, Burel will face the Slovenian Kaja Juvan (103rd), victorious 6-3, 6-3 over the former world No. 1 Angelique Kerber.

Silver medalist at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018, Burel embodies the future of French women's tennis.

Already in 2018, she had been selected by Yannick Noah, then captain of the France Fed Cup team, as a substitute for the first round against Belgium.

The following year, she received an invitation to participate in her first Grand Slam in Australia, where she lost in the first round against Spain's Carla Suarez Navarro.

In Strasbourg last week, she won her first match on the main circuit at the expense of Ukraine's Kateryna Bondarenko, before losing to China's Shuai Zhang in the round of 16.

© 2020 AFP