\n<\/p>\n
Teenager Mirra Andreeva reached her first Madrid Open final with a 6-4 7-6 (10-8) victory over Hailey Baptiste.<\/b><\/p>\n
The 19-year-old Russian will face 26th seed Marta Kostyuk in Saturday’s final, after the Ukrainian beat Austria’s Anastasia Potapova 6-2 1-6 6-1.<\/p>\n
Ninth seed Andreeva has won all bar one of her 13 clay-court matches this season, taking the title in Linz and reaching the semi-finals in Stuttgart, and becomes the first teenager to reach three WTA 1000 finals.<\/p>\n
After taking the first set against the 30th seed, Andreeva served for the match at 5-4, but was broken by Baptiste who then took the second set to a tiebreak.<\/p>\n
The 24-year-old American, who defeated world number one Aryna Sabalenka in the previous round, saved three set points before Andreeva completed her win.<\/p>\n
“Honestly, I feel so much adrenaline inside. I feel like I’m still nervous. I’m just so happy that I won and that I was able to save all those set points,” said Andreeva, who has become the second-youngest finalist in the tournament’s history, behind Caroline Wozniacki.<\/p>\n
“The serve helped me a lot. I’m so, so happy – I cannot really find ways to describe what I’m feeling right now,” added Andreeva.<\/p>\n
Kostyuk advanced to her first WTA 1000 final in an error-strewn match against lucky loser Potapova, winning the first set with two breaks but losing the second in 30 minutes.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old raced to a 4-0 lead in the decider and refused to shake the hand of her Russian-born opponent after closing the match out.<\/p>\n
In the men’s tournament, defending champion Casper Ruud was beaten in the quarter-finals by Belgian Alexander Blockx, 6-4 6-4.<\/p>\n
Unseeded Blockx, who only broke into the top 100 for the first time last month and is at a career-high 69th in the world, has knocked out four consecutive seeds, including third-seeded Felix Auger-Aliassime, in the Spanish capital.<\/p>\n
The 21-year-old defeated Ruud, the Norwegian 21st seed, in 96 minutes and will now face Alexander Zverev in his first tour-level semi-final, having never previously won a tour match on clay prior to this season.<\/p>\n
Two-time Madrid champion Zverev won 6-1 6-4 against Italian 10th seed Flavio Cobolli, who beat the German en route to the Munich final 12 days ago, and has now reached the semi-finals in seven of his past eight Masters 1000 tournaments. <\/p>\n
Top seed Jannik Sinner will face 21st seed Arthur Fils in Friday’s other semi-final after the pair won their quarter-finals on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Teenager Mirra Andreeva reached her first Madrid Open final with a 6-4 7-6 (10-8) victory over Hailey Baptiste. The 19-year-old Russian will face 26th seed Marta Kostyuk in Saturday’s final, after the Ukrainian beat Austria’s Anastasia Potapova 6-2 1-6 6-1. Ninth seed Andreeva has won all bar one of her 13 clay-court matches this season,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}