NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND \u2014 Charleston\u2019s Emma Navarro reached the first grass-court final of her career with a 7-6(5), 6-2 win over Viktorija Golubic at the Nottingham Open on June 20.<\/p>\n
Navarro, who won her first clay court title at the Internationaux de Strasbourg<\/a> on May 23, has continued her resurgence after taking time off earlier in the season due to health issues<\/a>.<\/p>\n The third-seeded Navarro, who was high as No. 8 in the world and is now ranked No. 25, will face Marie Bouzkova in Sunday\u2019s final. Bouzkova, the No. 4 seed, reached the championship with a 6-4, 6-1 win over Karolina Pliskova.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m enjoying myself on the court and playing some good tennis, too,\u201d Navarro said on the court after the match.<\/p>\n Against the Swiss qualifier on Saturday, Navarro stormed out to a 5-2 lead in the opening set. But the 76th-ranked Golubic battled back to force a tiebreaker.<\/p>\n With the score 5-5 in the tiebreaker, a medical emergency in the crowd paused the action. When play was able to resume, Navarro forced an error out of Golubic before taking the first set.<\/p>\n In the second set, the 25-year-old Navarro rode the momentum to close out the match, finishing off the victory in 2 hours, 10 minutes.<\/p>\n \u201cReally tough battle today, a lot of really tough points. Wasn’t easy being up 5-2 in the first, losing three games in a row, and then getting to 6-all,\u201d Navarro said. \u201cI want to shout out the nice lady that couldn’t stay for the second set, I just want to thank her. I think she won me that set, so I hope she’s OK and recovering quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n Navarro\u2019s matchup at 7 a.m. Sunday (Tennis Channel) against the 27-year-old Bouzkova will be the first-ever meeting between the players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND \u2014 Charleston\u2019s Emma Navarro reached the first grass-court final of her career with a 7-6(5), 6-2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,9663,1750,359932,85,747,26599],"class_list":["post-749361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-championship","tag-emma-navarro","tag-nottingham-open","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-wta-tour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749361","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=749361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}