Britain’s Harriet Dart reached the second WTA Tour semi-final of her career when she fought back from a set down to beat fifth seed Paula Badosa at the Guangzhou Open in China.<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old triumphed 3-6 6-2 6-4 against Spain’s Badosa – ranked 54 places above her – in two hours and 15 minutes at Nansha International Tennis Centre.<\/p>\n
Dart’s first appearance in the semi-finals of a tour event was in the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca, where she lost in straight sets to Karolina Pliskova.<\/p>\n
She will face 16-year-old Chinese wildcard Sun Xinran in the last four on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in the business end of the tournament so I am really excited for that,” Dart said.<\/p>\n
“Tennis is so stressful, so to have the opportunity to compete again on Saturday is a great opportunity for me.”<\/p>\n
Dart, who came through qualifying and beat second-seed Janice Tjen in the previous round, lost her opening service game in the first set but broke back and drew level at 3-3.<\/p>\n
However, former world number two Badosa broke Dart’s serve again to take a 5-3 lead and held her serve to close out the set.<\/p>\n
The pair exchanged breaks at the start of the second set before Dart seized the upper hand to level at 1-1.<\/p>\n
Badosa, who required two medical timeouts during the match as she appeared to struggle with the heat, saved a match point at 5-3 in the deciding set and then broke Dart’s serve.<\/p>\n
But the Spaniard, ranked 61st in the world, was running on empty in her next service game, as Dart won it to love.<\/p>\n
“It was an incredible battle. I thought Paula started really strongly. I was always behind, and knew it was going to be an incredibly tough match,” Dart added.<\/p>\n
“I really needed to hang in there during the tough moments and wait for a chance. Luckily I was able to take my chance, and I am very excited to be in the semi-finals.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Harriet Dart reached the second WTA Tour semi-final of her career when she fought back from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":818804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-818803","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\/818803","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=818803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/818804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}