Defending champion Aryna Sabalenka fell to a 6-1 6-4 defeat by Elena Rybakina in the quarter-finals of the Cincinnati Open.<\/p>\n
The Kazakh dominated the opening set and racked up 11 aces against the world number one before sealing her victory in 74 minutes. <\/p>\n
“I’m happy with the serve. It was the key today,” Rybakina said. <\/p>\n
“I served really well. If she had been serving well it would have been a totally different match. It was also intense from the baseline. I just hope to continue like this.”<\/p>\n
Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon winner, will now face this year’s All England Club champion in the last four – as Iga Swiatek beat Anna Kalinskaya 6-3 6-4.<\/p>\n
Poland’s Swiatek, ranked third in the world, was always in charge against the Russian, who appeared hampered by a calf problem and saved four match points in the penultimate game.<\/p>\n
However, Swiatek prevailed to move into her fourth WTA 1,000-level semi-final of the season.<\/p>\n
“I just played my game. It was not easy but I’m happy that I stayed solid and kept my intensity,” said the Pole.<\/p>\n
French Open champion Coco Gauff is out after an error-strewn performance in her three-set loss to Italian Jasmine Paolini.<\/p>\n
Gauff took the first set but hit 16 double faults, allowing Paolini to break her serve eight times on the way to a comeback 2-6 6-4 6-3 win.<\/p>\n
Seventh seed Paolini, who overcame a twisted ankle in the third set, will face Veronika Kudermetova in the semi-finals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defending champion Aryna Sabalenka fell to a 6-1 6-4 defeat by Elena Rybakina in the quarter-finals of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-71817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71817","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=71817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}