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Canada’s Leylah Fernandez moved closer to her second WTA title of the season with a 4-6, 6-2, 6-1 win over Russia’s Ekaterina Alexandrova in quarterfinal action Friday at the Ningbo Open.<\/p>\n
Fernandez evened her career record against Alexandrova at 3-3 after her second win over the Russian in as many weeks.<\/p>\n
The 24-year-old from Laval, Que., was dominant after dropping the first set, scoring four breaks while surrendering none over the next two sets.<\/p>\n
Fernandez has won 12 of her last 15 matches and earned her sixth career WTA title last month in Singapore.<\/p>\n
The Canadian will next face Marie Bouzkova in the semifinals at the WTA 500 hardcourt tournament.<\/p>\n
Bouzkova won their only other meeting in the first round of the 2019 Rogers Cup (now National Bank Open) in Toronto.<\/p>\n
Rybakina avoids major upset<\/p>\n
Top-ranked Elena Rybakina avoided a major upset as she was pushed to a deciding set by qualifier Katarzyna Kawa in the quarterfinals of the Ningbo Open on Friday.<\/p>\n
Rybakina eventually made it through 6-1, 3-6, 6-1 to set up a semifinal meeting with Diana Shnaider and continue her Ningbo title defense.<\/p>\n
The 128th-ranked Kawa was coming off a big upset win over Belinda Bencic and threatened another when she broke Rybakina’s serve three times in a back-and-forth second set.<\/p>\n
Sixth-seeded Shnaider beat fourth-seeded American Iva Jovic 6-3, 4-6, 6-1 and will now bid to reach the Ningbo final again after she was runner-up in 2023.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Karolina Muchova secured the last spot at the season-ending WTA Finals after Marta Kostyuk retired in Ningbo with wrist pain and Iga Swiatek withdrew with a thigh injury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-943497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943497","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=943497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}