World number one Aryna Sabalenka’s Wimbledon \u200bpreparations suffered a setback after she was \u200bbeaten by American Jessica Pegula \u200c6-4 6-7(4) \u200b6-0 in the Berlin Open semi-finals.<\/p>\n
Pegula will face Linda Noskova in the final after the Czech eighth seed ended the run \u200cof Filipino Alexandra Eala with a 6-2 6-4 victory. Sabalenka, who exited the French Open in the quarter-finals, struggled to find her rhythm after a slow start, and Pegula took the opening set \u200cfollowing an early break.<\/p>\n
After a rain delay, Sabalenka took the second-set tiebreak before Pegula \u200creasserted control to race through the decider. “I told myself after I ended up losing that second-set tiebreak that before the rain delay, I had a lot of momentum. She just hit a double fault. I felt like \u2060I kind \u200bof had it there \u2060and I was serving well,” said 2024 Berlin champion Pegula.<\/p>\n
“I was in a good rhythm, and then having \u2060to get off court and losing that pretty quickly — only winning one point in the tiebreak was a \u200blittle tough. “But she’s No. 1 in the world for a reason and I feel \u2060like I gave her too many easy shots and she went for it and that’s just what happens.”<\/p>\n
All four \u2060of \u200bthe Belarusian’s Grand Slam titles \u2014 her most recent at the 2025 U.S. Open \u2014 have come on hard courts, and she is still chasing a first Wimbledon crown after three \u2060semi-final runs. She lost this year’s Australian Open final to Elena Rybakina, a year after finishing runner-up \u2060to American Madison \u2060Keys.<\/p>\n
Noskova made a dominant start, securing an early break to swiftly win the first set. Eala ran out of ideas in the second as \u200cNoskova secured \u200cthe win. <\/p>\n
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number one Aryna Sabalenka’s Wimbledon \u200bpreparations suffered a setback after she was \u200bbeaten by American Jessica Pegula…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[829,217,6538,207,8714,2142,8715,2265,285],"class_list":["post-22072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-aryna-sabalenka","tag-alexandra-eala","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-berlin","tag-french-open","tag-noskova","tag-pegula","tag-rain-delay","tag-sabalenka","tag-wimbledon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}