Hailey Baptiste saved six match points as she stunned world number one and defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in the quarter-finals of the Madrid Open.<\/p>\n
Baptiste, the 30th seed, came through 2-6 6-2 7-6 (8-6) in a little over two and a half hours to end Sabalenka’s 15-match winning streak. <\/p>\n
She is just the second player, after Elena Rybakina in the Australian Open final, to defeat the Belarusian this season.<\/p>\n
“I played her a few weeks ago [in Miami] and it was a close match. I had a better idea of how to play her and adjustments I needed to make,” Baptiste, 24, said.<\/p>\n
“It was an uncomfortable situation for her, me serving and volleying, hitting a drop shot in one of the match points. It’s not the easiest position to put her in, which is the plan.”<\/p>\n
After dropping the first set, Baptiste converted three of her four break points in the second to force a decider.<\/p>\n
Trailing 5-4 in the third, the American saved five match points before earning the opportunity to serve for the match after breaking Sabalenka for a third time in the set.<\/p>\n
Sabalenka broke back and later brought up a sixth match point at 6-5 in the tie-break. However, Baptiste rattled off three consecutive points to complete her maiden win over a top-five player.<\/p>\n
She will face world number nine Mirra Andreeva, of Russia, who beat Canada’s Leylah Fernandez in straight sets, in the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
“She played really brave tennis on those match points,” Sabalenka said. “In the first game of the second set, I double faulted twice out of nowhere. That gave her belief. She started playing aggressively. What can I say? Well done.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hailey Baptiste saved six match points as she stunned world number one and defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-613049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}