Jelena Ostapenko’s mastery of Iga Swiatek knows no bounds — not tournament level, arena or even Swiatek’s favorite surface.<\/p>\n
In the pair’s first-ever clay-court meeting on Saturday at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, the 2017 Roland Garros champion ran her head-to-head record against the Pole to 6-0 with a 6-3, 3-6, 6-2 win to advance to the semifinals at the WTA 500 event for the first time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stuttgart:\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>|\u00a0<\/strong>Scores<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>|<\/strong>\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n She has now defeated Swiatek, who came into the match 11-1 in Stuttgart, on all surfaces, with four hard-court wins and one grass-court victory accounting for the other victories. She was a 6-3, 6-1 winner against Swiatek just two months ago in Doha, and though Saturday’s affair was a much more taxing effort, the result proved the same after 2 hours and 7 minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ostapenko stormed to the first four games of the match, and broke Swiatek’s serve three times to capture the first set. Though the World No. 2 hit back in set two, winning the last three games, Ostapenko won 12 of the first 15 points of the deciding set to take a lead she never relinquished.<\/p>\n “I think I was playing to maybe 8 or 9 today,” Ostapenko confessed after the match. “I mean, I could probably win in two sets because second set I started to rush a little bit, but in general, I think I was playing well.<\/p>\n “Of course she’s a great player, obviously. To play against her is a tough battle. Every time I’m expecting a tough battle. But I think in deciding moments I kind of knew that I will have the chances to win this match.”<\/p>\n Ostapenko’s win assures an unseeded finalist in Stuttgart, as she’ll face Ekaterina Alexandrova in the final four. World No. 22 Alexandrova was a 6-0, 6-4 winner over No. 3 seed Jessica Pegula in Saturday’s first quarterfinal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jelena Ostapenko’s mastery of Iga Swiatek knows no bounds — not tournament level, arena or even Swiatek’s favorite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,661,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-35993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-text","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114371183456127661","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}