Bencic defeated American Sofia Kenin in a back-and-forth three-set battle Saturday in Tokyo, winning 7-6 (5), 3-6, 6-2 in 2 hours and 15 minutes to advance to the final against Linda Noskova.<\/p>\n
Tokyo: Scores<\/a> | Draw<\/a> | Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n It marks Bencic\u2019s second final appearance at the Toray Pan Pacific Open, coming 10 years after she finished runner-up at the event as an 18-year-old. The win also sends her to her 10th career final and second of the season, having captured the WTA 500 title in Abu Dhabi in February.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a very difficult match, for sure,\u201d Bencic said after the match. \u201cI\u2019m really exhausted at this point. I don\u2019t know how (I got through it). I just tried to shorten the points, take more risks and try to go for it. Thankfully, today it went my way.\u201d<\/p>\n She credited the crowd with helping both players push through.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very motivating to see a full stadium,\u201d she said. \u201cThanks to the fans and the crowd, we were able to fight, and both take out whatever we had in us.\u201d<\/p>\n While it wasn\u2019t the smoothest path to victory, perhaps Bencic can take solace in the fact that the match concluded in under three hours, which hasn\u2019t always been a given for her this season.<\/p>\n More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bencic defeated American Sofia Kenin in a back-and-forth three-set battle Saturday in Tokyo, winning 7-6 (5), 3-6, 6-2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,1602,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-224342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}