Italian second seed Jasmine Paolini kept her hopes of qualifying for the WTA Finals alive with a gritty comeback win over Belinda Bencic, beating Switzerland’s Tokyo Olympic gold medallist 5-7, 7-5, 6-3 in the Ningbo Open quarter-finals on Friday.<\/p>\n
Paolini<\/a> will face third-seed Elena Rybakina<\/a> in the semis, after the Russian-born Kazakh took less than an hour to beat Ajla Tomljanovic<\/a> 6-2, 6-0<\/a> later in the day.<\/p>\n Twice Grand Slam finalist Paolini needs a win over Rybakina in the last four to qualify for next month’s WTA Finals in Riyadh.<\/p>\n The contest against Bencic<\/a> at the WTA 500 hard-court tournament, which lasted a marathon three hours and 22 minutes, marked the longest match of Paolini’s season<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bencic, 28, served for the match at 5-4 in the second set but was unable to close it out. Her momentum was further interrupted in the deciding set when she took a medical time-out due to a thigh issue while trailing 4-3.<\/p>\n “One of the toughest I ever played, honestly,” Paolini, who was the runner-up at last year’s French Open and Wimbledon, said. “Belinda, she’s an amazing player and a very good person. Today she deserved to win as well, so it was really tough.<\/p>\n “I’m happy I stayed there, because at the beginning I had too many mistakes. I couldn’t find my best tennis, but then I just tried to stay there every point and turn the match somehow.”<\/p>\n Aryna Sabalenka<\/a>, Iga Swiatek<\/a>, Coco Gauff<\/a>, Amanda Anisimova<\/a>, Jessica Pegula<\/a> and Madison Keys<\/a> have all qualified for the season-ending championship of the WTA Tour in Riyadh, with two spots still up for grabs.<\/p>\n Rybakina eases past Tomljanovic<\/p>\n Rybakina also remained in contention for a place at the WTA Finals, as she landed seven aces while a struggling Tomljanovic made nine double faults.<\/p>\n Former Wimbledon champion Rybakina has now won 50 matches on the tour this year and qualified for seven semi-finals.<\/p>\n “Of course it would be nice to qualify (for the WTA Finals). But I know for this I still need to win a lot of matches. Not only here, but also next week,” Rybakina said.<\/p>\n “Today I think I served well. It\u2019s not easy to play Ajla. Today a lot of things went my way. Also some lines which I caught. Overall, happy I won in straight sets. Looking forward to tomorrow.”<\/p>\n Russian fourth seed Ekaterina Alexandrova<\/a> brushed aside American McCartney Kessler<\/a> 6-3, 6-3<\/a>. Alexandrova will next face the winner of the clash between local favourite Zhu Lin<\/a> and seventh seed Diana Shnaider<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italian second seed Jasmine Paolini kept her hopes of qualifying for the WTA Finals alive with a gritty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228153,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-228152","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}