The match began with five successive breaks of serve – mostly due to excellent returning by both players – but it was Sabalenka who finally took charge.<\/p>\n
Doubles specialist Townsend, who walked out wearing a long, black-feathered outfit, continued to frustrate Sabalenka and forced her to serve out the set at the second opportunity, before making the breakthrough in the second set.<\/p>\n
But Sabalenka, aware she must lift the trophy to have a chance of retaining her number one ranking, produced an immediate reply as she broke back to love.<\/p>\n
That signalled the start of Sabalenka’s dash to the finish line. The top seed lost just five points across the final five games to end Townsend’s challenge in 75 minutes.<\/p>\n
Sabalenka was full of praise for Townsend, saying: “What an incredible player she is, approaching the net, a great returner, moving well, very brave.<\/p>\n
“You can see how focused she was. It was really challenging playing her, especially here. <\/p>\n
“Thank you so much [to the crowd] for being so respectful to me. I knew coming into this match that you guys would be on her side, but you were sometimes cheering for me and I really appreciate that.”<\/p>\n
At home on the US Open hard courts, Sabalenka has not failed to reach the semi-finals here since 2020.<\/p>\n
But, following a fourth-round exit at Wimbledon, she is aiming to avoid a first season without a major title since 2022.<\/p>\n
Noskova’s sense of relief was cleared as she crouched to the ground after taking her sixth match point about an hour after earning her first.<\/p>\n
The 21-year-old served for the match in the second set, but missed her first two match points as Kostyuk battled back from 5-3 down to force a decider.<\/p>\n
The players exchanged breaks of serve in a tense final set, but it was Noskova who emerged, once again, with a 5-3 advantage.<\/p>\n
Noskova failed to take her next two match points as a couple of misses helped Kostyuk to deuce, and missed her fifth after saving a break point, before finally getting over the line after an emotionally draining two and a half hours on court.<\/p>\n
“I am more than relieved, this match was so tough, emotionally a bit more than physically,” Noskova said.<\/p>\n
“Today was very close, it could have ended both ways. With all the chances I had in the second set, it was tough to still kind of restart.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The match began with five successive breaks of serve – mostly due to excellent returning by both players…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":885935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-885934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885934","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=885934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/885935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}