No. 4 seed Jessica Pegula pulled off a comeback from 6-1, 3-1 down to maintain her perfect record against No. 2 seed Amanda Anisimova, advancing to the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships final 1-6, 6-4, 6-3 in 2 hours and 2 minutes.<\/p>\n
Dubai:\u00a0Scores\u00a0<\/a>| \u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Pegula now leads her head-to-head against Anisimova 5-0, backing up her wins in the 2020 Western & Southern Open second round, 2024 Charleston second round, 2024 Toronto final and last month’s Australian Open quarterfinals. Three of Pegula’s five wins have come in three sets.<\/p>\n The 31-year-old booked her spot in her 21st career final on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, and 10th at WTA 1000 level or above. She is a three-time WTA 1000 champion (Guadalajara 2022, Montreal 2023 and Toronto 2024), a four-time WTA 1000 runner-up (Madrid 2022, Cincinnati 2024, Miami 2025, Wuhan 2025), and was also a finalist at the 2023 WTA Finals Cancun and 2024 US Open.<\/p>\n Pegula will face either No. 3 seed Coco Gauff or No. 7 seed Elina Svitolina as she bids to lift the Dubai trophy for the first time. She leads her head-to-head against Gauff 5-3 (including 3-1 on outdoor hard courts) and against Svitolina 5-3 (including 5-2 on outdoor hard courts).<\/p>\n How did Pegula pull off the comeback?<\/strong><\/p>\n Pegula can usually be relied upon for concise and accurate match analysis as soon as her on-court interviews. This time, even she seemed mystified.<\/p>\n “At the start of the third, it was 1-1,” she said. “I just looked at my coach and I was like, ‘I’m just happy I’m still even here right now.’ She was playing some incredible tennis, and I just came out a little slow. And when you come out slow against Amanda, she can really just wipe you off the court, which is what she was doing.<\/p>\n “I held on to my serve there in the second set. I just kept telling myself that. I had some break points in the first set, even though it was convincingly the other way, and I knew I could get some break points back. That’s really all I was focusing on.”<\/p>\n Indeed, there was no single, dramatic turning point. Pegula clawed her way back into the match gradually — it was the work of the whole set, game by game. To break it down further, here are the key moments:<\/p>\n Even though Pegula hadn’t fully turned the scoreboard in her favour at this point, her tactics were beginning to wrest the match away from Anisimova’s first-strike territory. Pegula was beginning to draw overhead errors with sky-high defensive lobs, and disrupt Anisimova’s timing with defensive slices. She levelled again at 4-4 — and this time, ran away with the momentum. From 4-3 down, Pegula won seven of the next eight games to go up 4-1 in the third set.<\/p>\n “I was running a lot,” Pegula said in her press conference. “I knew I had to use my legs, get my feet under me … get my feet under and stay in the points because she was hitting a really big ball. I was just having trouble, like, starting the points.<\/p>\n “I had to really make it a little physical there for a while. Then obviously at the end when I gained that momentum, it felt like there was a little bit of a lull in the energy where she was maybe, I don’t know, a little tired. It was definitely mental and physical at the end.”<\/p>\n The end result was a turnaround in Anisimova’s fortunes — just 24 hours earlier, she had pulled off a comeback of her own, defeating Mirra Andreeva 2-5, 7-5, 7-6(4) from 6-2, 2-0 down.<\/p>\n How did Pegula explain her dominance in the head-to-head?<\/strong><\/p>\n Pegula modestly claimed bafflement on this front, too.<\/p>\n “It’s a really tough matchup,” she said. “It’s not like we have easy matches. We have battles every single time.”<\/p>\n But her pundit’s hat soon came out, and her analysis was again on point.<\/p>\n “I do think that I’m able to take some time away from her,” she said. “I’m able to hit a low, flat ball, and not let her set up and go for her big shots, which is what she’s good at. I try to utilize that the best I can and then mix in some variety, change things up. We had a lot of cat-and-mouse points, and they mostly went my way. So that was good.”<\/p>\n And even if Pegula isn’t taking it for granted, her perfect history against Anisimova is a reminder that, even when the scoreline’s against her, she’s never out of the match.<\/p>\n “I’m sure it helps me,” she said in her press conference. “I’m not sure what she’s thinking about. I think I know that I can turn matches around.<\/p>\n “I know what I can do to kind of bother her game. I just felt like I couldn’t quite get into that yet as the first set went. I feel like I just need to get to that part where I’m starting to bother her with my strategy and what I’m doing. She was doing a very good job of not letting me get there … Once I dug in, maybe she lost her timing a little bit, I was able to take my opportunity to do what I know probably bothers her.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 4 seed Jessica Pegula pulled off a comeback from 6-1, 3-1 down to maintain her perfect record…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":777650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,661,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-777649","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\/116104338563531830","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777649","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=777649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/777650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n