Aryna Sabalenka lost another deciding set without winning a game as an impressive Jessica Pegula beat the world number one to reach the Berlin Open final.<\/p>\n
Belarusian Sabalenka never looked settled against Pegula, who recovered from losing a tight second set to come through 6-4 6-7 (4-7) 6-0.<\/p>\n
American Pegula had lost five of her past six matches against Sabalenka but her flat shots and superb return of serve anchored her performance this time around.<\/p>\n
For Sabalenka it is another disappointing deciding-set performance, having lost the third set of her French Open quarter-final 6-0 after squandering a set and double break lead. <\/p>\n
Pegula had fought back from 5-2 down in the second set to force a tie-break and led 3-1 before rain delayed play for an hour.<\/p>\n
When they returned, Sabalenka won six of the next seven points to force a deciding set – only for Pegula to dominate the top seed.<\/p>\n
“She came out and ripped a bunch of winners and I told myself ‘I guess I wanted to win in the hard way anyway’,” Pegula, 32, said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t get super emotional. People used to tell me when I was younger that I need to yell more and jump up and down.<\/p>\n
“Honestly, it feels like a waste of energy to me. I just try to be myself.”<\/p>\n
Pegula will face either Czech Linda Noskova or Alexandra Eala of the Philippines in Sunday’s final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aryna Sabalenka lost another deciding set without winning a game as an impressive Jessica Pegula beat the world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-715867","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\/715867","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=715867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}