Alexander Zverev booked his place in the US Open final on Friday, beating Karen Khachanov \u20606-3 7-6(7) 7-6(6) to move a step closer to a second Grand Slam title.<\/p>\n
The French Open champion had been pushed to five sets in each of his opening two rounds but has now won four straight matches without dropping a set, as he reached his third consecutive major final.<\/p>\n
The victory also sends \u200chim to his \u2060second title decider at Flushing Meadows, after finishing runner-up in 2020 to Dominic Thiem.<\/p>\n
Zverev struck first to take the opening set before carrying that momentum into the second with an early break.<\/p>\n
Khachanov, however, found his \u200crange and broke back, ending Zverev’s run of 37 consecutive service games without being broken. \u2060The unseeded Russian then threatened to swing the match \u200cin a gripping tiebreak.<\/p>\n
The German held his nerve to \u2060close it \u200cout after a 14-minute breaker, aided by Khachanov’s errors at the crucial moments.<\/p>\n
The third set followed a similar pattern, with Khachanov taking a brief \u2060lead in the tiebreak before Zverev again fought back to seal \u2060his seventh win in 10 meetings against the Russian.<\/p>\n
Zverev, who now boasts a 24-2 record in Grand Slam matches this season, will face the winner of the all-American semi-final between Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton in Sunday’s title match.<\/p>\n
“I can’t wait for Sunday. It’s going to be incredibly special, Francis and Ben are crowd favourites here in New York,” Zverev said.<\/p>\n
“Tonight is going to be an epic semi-final, I\u2019m looking forward to watching it. Hopefully I can (stop) the \u200cAmerican dream coming true.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexander Zverev booked his place in the US Open final on Friday, beating Karen Khachanov \u20606-3 7-6(7) 7-6(6)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-622019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622019","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=622019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}