Either Victoria Mboko or Emma Navarro will leave the Internationaux de Strasbourg with a first career clay-court title at WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz level on Saturday after winning Friday’s semifinals.<\/p>\n
Strasbourg:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n A resurgent Navarro, who last won back-to-back matches in January and recently returned to the tour after time away for health reasons, dominated an all-American matchup with Ann Li 6-1, 6-3 to reach her first showpiece match on tour in more than a year — since winning in Mexico last March when she herself was a Top 10 player. Top seed Mboko then followed her into Saturday’s tilt by outlasting Jaqueline Cristian 7-6(3), 3-6, 6-2 to advance to her third final of the season after runner-up efforts in both Adelaide and Doha.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first-time meeting between Mboko and Navarro will also give the winner her third career WTA singles title, and a notable boost ahead of the year’s second Grand Slam tournament at Roland Garros. Navarro is 2-0 in tour-level finals, both at WTA 500 level, while Mboko was a winner in Montreal and Hong Kong last year.<\/p>\n Mboko finding her feet on the terre battue<\/p>\n Mboko is not just competing in her first tour-level clay-court final in Strasbourg. Before this week, she had never played a quarterfinal or semifinal on the surface either. Being short on match play this spring — she lost her opener in Madrid and withdrew from Rome with illness — led to her taking a late wild card into Strasbourg.\u00a0<\/p>\n It proved the right choice. Her 2 hour and 52-minute win over Cristian was an impressive match to win for anyone, but especially someone who’s still comparatively new to clay-court tennis — and needed a medical timeout midway through to boot.<\/p>\n The in-form Romanian, who just last week reached her career-high ranking of No. 28 and professes clay to be her favorite surface, led 5-2 in the first set and had three set points — one each in the 5-2, 5-4 and 6-5 games. She also had all the momentum entering the final set, as she had two break points in Mboko’s first service game of the decider.<\/p>\n She didn’t convert either of them, and the World No. 10 broke serve in the game that immediately followed it to take a lead she never relinquished even despite playing the second half of the match with her right pectoral muscle taped.<\/p>\n Fourth time’s the charm in Strasbourg for Navarro<\/p>\n Navarro has nearly doubled her season’s total of wins this week in Strasbourg, and her win over Li was her most impressive.<\/p>\n She stormed out to a 6-1, 5-1 lead in under an hour before Li captured consecutive games. But the deficit — made in large part to the fact that Li struck 41 unforced errors to just 20 winners in 1 hour and 17 minutes — proved too large.\u00a0<\/p>\n Navarro showed some of the rally tolerance that took her to a career-high ranking of World No. 8 to frustrate Li into misses, and said afterwards that she was “really happy” with her performance. She saved seven of eight break points faced.<\/p>\n “I’m excited,” Navarro said after booking her place in the final in her fourth career trip to Strasbourg. “I had a lot of fun playing out here today.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Either Victoria Mboko or Emma Navarro will leave the Internationaux de Strasbourg with a first career clay-court title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":688375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":["post-688560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688560","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=688560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}