Raducanu suffered a listless second-round exit at January’s Australian Open and subsequently split with coach Francisco Roig.<\/p>\n
However, she has shown real grit throughout her run in Romania to reach the final.<\/p>\n
“I’m so proud of how I competed, how I came back in the third set and how I managed the match,” Raducanu said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I could have done it without everyone’s support here so thank you so much.”<\/p>\n
Raducanu’s father, Ion, is from Bucharest and the exhausted but thrilled player briefly addressed the crowd in Romanian after her victory.<\/p>\n
Only home hope Sorana Cirstea now stands between Raducanu and her first piece of silverware in five years.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old failed to serve out the opening set at the first time of asking, allowing Oliynykova to break back before winning the next two games – wrapping it up after a gruelling hour and 15 minutes.<\/p>\n
But the top seed’s momentum faltered further in the second set and she was broken three times as Oliynykova forced a decider, where Raducanu was forced to fight back from a break down.<\/p>\n
And after missing her first two match points at 5-3, the Briton saved two break-back points and served out the win at the third time of asking.<\/p>\n
The victory snapped a six-match losing streak in deciding sets for Raducanu, while it was her first three-set win since she beat Ann Li in the first round of Eastbourne in June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Raducanu suffered a listless second-round exit at January’s Australian Open and subsequently split with coach Francisco Roig. However,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-284690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}