Top seed Jessica Pegula and unseeded Linda Noskova set up a semifinal meeting at the Bad Homburg Open after contrasting semifinal wins on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Bad Homburg:\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>|<\/strong>\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>|\u00a0<\/strong>Order of Play<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Pegula held off fellow American Emma Navarro in a three-set quarterfinal 6-4, 1-6, 6-3 to advance to her first semifinal since winning the Credit One Charleston Open in April, while Noskova’s 6-3, 6-3 upset of No. 3 seed Mirra Andreeva ended an even longer semifinal drought.\u00a0The Czech last played in a semifinal in April in Abu Dhabi, and seeks her first Hologic WTA Tour singles final since winning her first tour-level trophy in Monterrey last August.<\/p>\n Pegula, who won her first grass-court title last year in Berlin, needed one minute more than 2 hours to hold off her Olympic teammate, who turned the match into a proper fight after falling 5-2 behind in the first set. Pegula stymied Navarro’s continued momentum after a one-sided second set by saving a break point at 1-1 in the third, and kept her lead from then on.<\/p>\n After losing the opening match of her title defense to Liudmila Samsonova last week — a match that lasted more than 3 hours and saw Pegula fail to convert multiple match points — the World No. 3 said she was happy to avoid similar perils against Navarro in a match that was interrupted by rain early on.<\/p>\n “We got a little lucky with the rain,” Pegula said post-match. “It seemed to settle down a bit because when I was warming up, it was really really difficult. Even though the rain isn’t good, I think it turned into a really beautiful afternoon, so that was really nice.<\/p>\n “It was still a little breezy, a little gusty at times, and it’s grass — so it makes every shot a little more awkward — so I was just really trying to focus on getting my feet under me and trying to focus on my shots.”<\/p>\n Noskova finds her feet<\/strong>: Noskova earned her ninth career Top 10 victory over Andreeva in a match that lasted 1 hour and 18 minutes — and in which the Czech never lost serve.<\/p>\n World No. 30 Noskova won three of the last four games of the first set — breaking Andreeva at love in the sixth game — and won the last four games of the second set to move through to the final four. Noskova last won three matches at a tournament in Dubai — two weeks after her last semifinal appearance of the season — and coincidentally, upset Pegula at that event in the Round of 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Top seed Jessica Pegula and unseeded Linda Noskova set up a semifinal meeting at the Bad Homburg Open…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[62,1464,4063,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-17988","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-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}