“Kaja (Karolina) brought out the very best of me today. It took me a long time to verbalise that I wanted to win this incredible tournament… being able to live out my dream right now is better than I ever could have imagined.
“I didn’t sleep a lot last night and as I was thinking of all the what ifs but I felt at home out on the court.
“I hope I made Evonne proud.”
Barty won her maiden Grand Slam at the 2019 French Open, but joining the likes of Goolagong, Margaret Court, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe as a Wimbledon champion cements her name amongst Australian sporting greats.
“So happy for you, our dreams come true, what a fight,” four-time Wimbledon champion Laver said on Twitter.
Not since 1977 had two first-time Wimbledon finalists gone head to head in the women’s championship match.
But for the first set only one showed up.
Eighth seed Pliskova, whose previous Grand Slam final ended in defeat at the U.S. Open in 2016, suffered every player’s worst nightmare as she froze solid.
Her feet seemed stuck in clay, her arms in a straight jacket and her mind in a fog as Barty helped herself to the first 14 points of the match with clinical precision.
It felt like a slow motion train crash and the 15,000 Centre Court crowd did not know whether to watch or turn their faces away out of respect for the suffering Czech.
When she got on the scoreboard thanks to a Barty error, a huge cheer broke the tension and Pliskova smiled awkwardly.
A double fault left her 0-4 down though and it was hard to see how she would win a game, let alone the title.
With Barty rampant, it looked as though she might not require much more than the 23 minutes it took Suzanne Lenglen to defeat Molla Mallory in 1922, the shortest final on record.
But gradually the 29-year-old Pliskova defrosted and she broke Barty’s serve to love to win her first game, only to surrender serve for the third time in the match.
En route to the final, she had been broken only four times and served 54 aces.
