Canada’s Leylah Fernandez advanced to her first semifinal of the season with a 6-4, 7-6 (4) win over American qualifier and former doubles partner Taylor Townsend on Friday at the Citi Open hard court tennis tournament in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
Fernandez played an aggressive return game against Townsend and had 23 break-point chances, converting five.<\/p>\n
Still, Fernandez only finished the game one break ahead after defending just three of the seven break-point chances she faced.<\/p>\n
Fernandez, who advanced to the quarterfinals with a win Thursday over top-seed Jessica Pegula, appeared to be battling cramps in the second set, but held on to win the second set tiebreak.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old from Laval, Que., will next face the winner of a match later Friday between third-seed Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan or fifth-seed Magdalena Frech of\u00a0Poland.<\/p>\n
The Canadian is rounding into form at the right time, with the main draw of the women’s National Bank Open kicking off Sunday in Montreal.<\/p>\n
Fernandez joins Britain’s Emma Raducanu in the semifinals in Washington. It’s the first time they have been in the final four of a tournament since they met in the final of the 2021 U.S. Open, which Raducanu won in straight sets.<\/p>\n
Fernandez and Townsend had success as a doubles tandem during the 2023 season. While they did not win a title, they made it to the final of the French Open and the WTA 1000 Miami Open, as well as the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada’s Leylah Fernandez advanced to her first semifinal of the season with a 6-4, 7-6 (4) win over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":{"0":"post-24864","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}