The crowd is the third participant in every tennis match. It has the power to bend the outcome. My favorite crowds: when an athlete playing far from home syncs up with some huge diasporic pocket of their people. That’s one of the beautiful things about the fact that the US Open is set in Queens, the most diasporic place in the world—every player’s got a cheering section in their native tongue. You can sit down at an outer court and see the Astoria Serbs going head-to-head with the Flushing Chinese, a battle parallel to the one on court.

All the Slams have some version of this, even the one Slam that is not located in a major global metropolis. Melbourne is the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, and as it turns out, Victoria is home to Australia’s largest Turkish population. Immigration surged in the ’70s and ’80s, and according to the 2021 census, there are now more than 47,000 people in Victoria with Turkish ancestry.

Judging by the noise, at least half of those people have been attending the recent matches of Zeynep Sonmez, the 23-year-old from Istanbul who has been trailblazing for a country with limited tennis lineage. A fleet-footed aggressor with flat strokes and a knack for net play, Sonmez became just the second Turkish woman ever to claim a WTA title when she won the 250 in Merida back in 2024. She took another step forward in 2025, when at Wimbledon she became the first Turkish player ever to reach the third round at a Slam, and in October she hit a career high of No. 69 in the world. 

By the time this Australian Open rolled around, her ranking had slid and she was bound for the qualifying rounds. She cruised through all three matches there, and in the first round of the main draw she dispatched the No. 11 seed, the slap-happy Ekatarina Alexandrova. That was just the second time she’d beaten a top 20 player. (Mid-match, Sonmez also rescued a ball girl who was just a few seconds away from fainting in the heat.) After her second-round win over Anna Bondar, Sonmez reflected on the absurd crowd support she has enjoyed in Melbourne. “I’ve never experienced something like this,” she told the press. “At first I felt like I couldn’t even hear my own thoughts. It was very, very loud.” But after refocusing, she said, she was able to draw on their support to get through tight moments in the match.

When I tuned in to her third-round match against Yulia Putintseva, dozens of red flags were flapping in the stands, chants of “Turkiye” were booming, the energy was unbelievable, and then I looked at the score and saw that Sonmez was already down a set and a break. That’s how a truly passionate crowd will behave. Even when the player is that distant from victory, they’re still causing a ruckus. I later learned that Sonmez had just won a spectacular point involving a Putintseva tweener, hence the cheers, but really, they didn’t need a specific reason, the volume was turned all the way up the entire match.

Perhaps the Sonmez faithful did not read the scouting report, however. Their energy might have energized the opponent, too. Putintseva, short-statured and delightfully rude, is not one to be cowed by a partisan crowd. She had just taken down two opponents with massive fan support, and she seemed eager for the opportunity to antagonize yet another diasporic community (Brazilian, French, now Turkish). Sonmez went on to level that second set and win it in a tiebreak. Sonmez, who was spotted last season reading Descartes during a changeover, studied her notebook as Putintseva took the customary momentum-breaker bathroom trip.

Though Sonmez had more power than her opponent, there were moments where her feet seemed asleep—a classic by-product of nerves—and she didn’t have the right spacing to the ball. And while it was a rough day from the baseline, to the tune of 73 unforced errors, Sonmez showcased an almost Alcarazian attitude to the net. She timed her approaches well and volleyed beautifully, winning 29 out of 35 points in the front court. It’s that layer of her game that most impressed me, that sets her apart from most of her contemporaries, and that makes me think that perhaps there’s a top 30 ranking in her future.

Nevertheless, she was broken early in the third, and Putintseva took over. The last few games went fast, and when Putintseva completed the 6–3, 6–7(3), 6–3 victory, she celebrated as only she could. She dropped her racquet, put her hand up to her ear, blew fat kisses, and did a little dance as the crowd showered her with boos. A crazy juxtaposition with Sonmez, who was waving her teary, heartfelt goodbye and signing flags, after achieving this career milestone, her second appearance in the third round of a Slam. Eventually the booing switched over to soccer-style cheers of “Zeynep,” and the atmosphere improved drastically. If Sonmez continues on the present trajectory, they’ll have plenty more opportunities to go wild in Melbourne in the years to come.