Winning ugly counts just the same.<\/p>\n
In a week full of highlight-worthy performances for Marta Kostyuk, Thursday\u2019s semifinal win over Anastasia Potapova wasn\u2019t one of them. But it didn\u2019t have to be. The 6-2, 1-6, 6-1 victory in 1 hour and 36 minutes sends her into her first WTA 1000 final in Madrid, where she\u2019ll face No. 9 seed Mirra Andreeva for what would be the biggest title of her career.<\/p>\n
Madrid:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n The match wrapped just before midnight inside Manolo Santana Stadium, but despite the late finish, Kostyuk looked energized as she walked off the court.<\/p>\n The win marks her 10th straight main-draw victory at the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz level, extending the best stretch of her career. Coming off a title in Rouen, she is through to back-to-back finals for the first time. The Ukrainian also improves to 3-2 against Potapova and has now won three straight in the head-to-head.<\/p>\n Credit to Potapova. After straight-set losses in their previous two meetings, including last year\u2019s Mutua Madrid Open fourth round, she punched back with a dominant second set to force a decider this time around. It was the first set Kostyuk has dropped all week.<\/p>\n More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winning ugly counts just the same. In a week full of highlight-worthy performances for Marta Kostyuk, Thursday\u2019s semifinal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[82,483],"class_list":{"0":"post-14842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-madrid","8":"tag-madrid","9":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}