Veronika Kudermetova and Elise Mertens, the 2022 WTA Finals Fort Worth champions, returned to the semifinals of the year-end finale with a 6-3, 6-3 defeat of Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in Riyadh.<\/p>\n
WTA Finals: Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n The match was a straightforward winner-takes-all scenario: with Hsieh Su-Wei and Jelena Ostapenko already guaranteed to top the Martina Navratilova Group, Wednesday’s winners would be guaranteed to advance to the last four in second place. It was also a renewal of one of the key rivalries of the clay-court season, in which the two pairs faced each other in Madrid, Rome and Roland Garros. Kudermetova and Mertens won the first, and Errani and Paolini the next two.<\/p>\n In their first meeting away from clay, No. 4 seeds Kudermetova and Mertens stayed on the front foot, finding 28 winners to the Italians’ seven, to take a firm grasp of the contest. Crisp volleying from Kudermetova was a key throughout, while Mertens came up with some spectacular gets — in particular a twisting backhand reflex at 5-2 in the second set.<\/p>\n “Part of my tactic was to be aggressive from first ball to last ball,” said Kudermetova with a grin afterwards, referencing her role as the duo’s power half. “Elise, she had other tactics!”<\/p>\n Errani and Paolini have reprised many features of their 2023 season — the Rome and Beijing titles, and significant trophies on the courts of Roland Garros — in 2024. Their near-duplicate year also now includes a round-robin finish at the WTA Finals. The No. 1 seeds came out on top of a handful of spectacular all-court points, but were uncharacteristically flat in important moments. Both double faulted on the first break point they faced in each set, and Paolini’s signature forehand went awry on game point in three of the last four games of the match.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Veronika Kudermetova and Elise Mertens, the 2022 WTA Finals Fort Worth champions, returned to the semifinals of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":{"0":"post-263584","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","12":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263584","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=263584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}