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It is an all-Chinese final at the ATX Open final in Austin Texas on Sunday, after Wang Xiyu and Yuan Yue earned straight-sets semi-final wins on Saturday.
Wang, the No 6 seed, reached the second WTA singles final of her career with a 6-3 7-6(4) win over top-seeded Anhelina Kalinina from Ukraine, while Yuan, seeded 8, was a 6-0 6-3 winner over Slovakia’s Anna Karolina Schmiedlova in the evening semi-final.
Wang, the 22-year-old left-hander, took an hour and 46 minutes to get past Kalinina, and Yuan, ranked 68 in the world, needed just 70 minutes to topple former Top 30 player Schmiedlova.
Aiming for her 3rd career WTA final and first on a hard court, Wang is now 2-0 against Kalinina, having also beaten the Ukrainian at Acapulco in 2020.
“I know [Kalinina is] a really top player,” Wang said afterwards. “I know she has the ability to keep high intensity all the time, so it forced me to be focused all the time and try to fight every point, and play my best. It was a very good lesson for me to play.”
Now ranked 64 Wang is a former top-ranked junior and won her first WTA title last September, hoisting the trophy at the hard-court event in Guangzhou in her home country.
Wang finished Saturday’s semi-final in Austin with 24 winners to Kalinina’s 7, and 8 of the Chinese’s winners were aces, an 82% success rate behind her first serve helping her to the win, but she also had to shake off 9 double-faults in the process.
Kalinina fought back from a break down on two separate occasions in the 70-minute second set, but Wang held firm in the tiebreak, reaching double match point with an overhead winner, and drawing a netted service return on her first to close out the win.
Yuan Yue, seeded 8, defeated Anna Karolina Schmiedlova in the evening semi-final on Saturday.
ATXopen.com
Later, in the evening, Yuan won the first 8 games before Schmiedlova got on the scoreboard at 6-0, 2-1, but the Chinese continued to power ahead and held a match point at 5-2, before the Slovak made one last stand, breaking serve for the first time to briefly keep herself in contention.
Schmiedlova then saved 3 more match points at 5-3, fighting back from 0-40 to deuce, but Yuan prevailed at last, converting on her 5th opportunity after the Slovak sent her backhand wide.
Yuan, who had a 6-for-11 break point conversion rate in the match, is into her second career WTA singles final, and is seeking her maiden title on Sunday, the 25-year-old having finished runner-up to Jessica Pegula in Seoul last October.
Sunday’s final will be the first tour-level meeting between Wang and Yuan, although Yuan did defeat Wang at a junior event in Beijing in 2015, and went on to win the junior title.
Katarzyna Kawa & Bibiane Schoofs upset the top seeds, Oksana Kalashnikova & Nadia Kichenok, to reach the doubles final in Austin
ATXopen.com
The doubles final will feature two teams that joined forces specifically for the ATX Open.
Though Australia’s Olivia Gadecki & Olivia Nicholls from Great Britain live 5 minutes apart in London, it took a transatlantic trip to bring the two together as a tennis pair.
The two Olivias, or ‘O2’ as they have been dubbed in Austin, will have to beat Poland’s Katarzyna Kawa & Bibiane Schoofs from the Netherlands to make the rare ‘first title on a first outing’ boast.
Team O2 breezed into the final via a walkover, whereas Kawa & Schoofs had to battle from a set down to upset No 1 seeds, Oksana Kalashnikova & Nadia Kichenok from Ukraine, 5-7 6-4 [10-7], for the chance to hoist the trophy.
For Gadecki, Sunday represents the first Hologic WTA final of her career, while Nicholls played and won her first final in Lyon two seasons ago.
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