No. 7 seeds Timea Babos and Luisa Stefani came from a set and twice a break down to dethrone defending champions Gabriela Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe at the WTA Finals Riyadh, triumphing 2-6, 7-5, [10-5] to book their place in the last four.

Having been absent from the tournament since 2019, three-time champion Babos’s return to the year-end finale sees the Hungarian make the semifinals for a fourth time overall. Stefani, who is making her tournament debut, is the first Brazilian to reach the last four at the WTA Finals in any discipline. The second-place finishers in the Liezel Huber Group will face the Martina Navratilova Group winners, Hsieh Su-Wei and Jelena Ostapenko, for the first time in Friday’s semifinals.

WTA Finals: Scores | Draws | Order of play

The result avenged two previous three-set losses to Dabrowski and Routliffe for Babos and Stefani, who had fallen to their opponents in both the Stuttgart semifinals and US Open quarterfinals this year. That seemed an unlikely outcome for a set-and-a-half. Routliffe in particular raced out of the blocks, coming up with three fine pieces of forecourt play in the first game en route to breaking Babos; the No. 3 seeds were also sharp when it came to scoreboard pressure, winning the first four deciding points of the match to advance to 6-2, 3-2.

“This year we had two very tough matches against Gaby and Erin,” Babos said afterwards. “Both times we were leading and then both times we couldn’t close it out, and they ended up winning the tournament. It’s a little bit karma, in a way, but we deserved it.”

With their backs to the wall, Babos and Stefani raised their games as Dabrowski and Routliffe’s intensity dipped. A sequence of four successive breaks followed in which Routliffe’s hitherto emphatic net game lapsed into error while Babos and Stefani began to find winning lobs and returns. At 5-5, Babos staved off two break points, and the Hungarian-Brazilian duo wrapped up the set after two Routliffe misjudgements: on the final two points of the set, the New Zealander left a Stefani return that landed in, then netted a backhand volley.

Babos won a fine net exchange to capture the super-tiebreak’s first mini-break, and from that point on her team kept their nose in front. A terrific off backhand winner from Babos extended their lead to 8-5, and they converted their first match point as Routliffe netted a smash.

Â