Russian 16-year-old Kristina Liutova is into the final in her first WTA Tour-level event, booking a title shot in Memphis with a 7-5, 6-1 victory over Elvina Kalieva on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Liutova<\/a>, ranked 229th in the world, will be the youngest player<\/a> to contest a WTA final since American Coco Gauff<\/a> in Austria in 2019.<\/p>\n The first player born in the 2010s to make a WTA final, she called her week in the 250-level event a “miracle journey” after her quarter-final win over sixth-seeded Caty McNally<\/a>.<\/p>\n In her first WTA main draw match she advanced past top-seeded Ekaterina Alexandrova<\/a>, who retired with heat illness with Liutova leading 7-6 (2), 4-6, 5-4.<\/p>\n She beat Australian Maya Joint<\/a> in the second round before knocking off McNally 6-3, 6-4.<\/p>\n In Sunday’s final she will face either 114th-ranked Czech Darja Vidmanova<\/a> who beat Renata Zarazua<\/a> of Mexico 6-3, 6-3<\/a> in the other semi-final.<\/p>\n Vidmanova, 23, will also be playing her first WTA final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian 16-year-old Kristina Liutova is into the final in her first WTA Tour-level event, booking a title shot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-725105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725105","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=725105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}