Having taken the first set in her Cincinnati quarterfinal Thursday, Jessica Pegula quickly found herself trailing 3-0 in the second. Things went from bad to worse when she took an off-court medical timeout and was broken again after returning to the court.<\/p>\n
After Amanda Anisimova closed out the second set with a trademark backhand winner, there was worry the match was headed for an untimely conclusion. But Pegula gutted it out. She moved in front 3-0 in the decider, and even after Anisimova broke back and dragged her into a third-set tiebreak, the World No. 3 emerged far from unscathed but with a 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (4) victory in 2 hours and 15 minutes.<\/p>\n
Cincinnati:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a><\/p>\n “I felt a little something on my serve, and everything else off the ground felt fine. But I felt it the (second) game on the 30-0 point,” Pegula told reporters. “Slightly, mental internal panicking a little bit, because when you feel something acute, you’re like, ‘Oh gosh, what do I do?’ And I think she did a great job of taking advantage of that and imposing her game as soon as I lost focus.<\/p>\n “I was still playing okay. I was able to break in the second and had a decent couple games. I was talking to my coach and told him what I felt and what was happening, and he was like, ‘Think long term, but if you want to play you need to hit your serve.’ … When I started the third, I was like I’m going to play full out. If something gets worse, maybe I stop, but it only got better.”<\/p>\n The win sends her through to her 15th career WTA 1000 semifinal, where she will face the winner of No. 2 seed Elena Rybakina and No. 7 seed Iga Swiatek.<\/p>\n Pegula’s winning streak over Anisimova stays intact<\/p>\n Against all odds, Pegula also extended her perfect record in her head-to-head with Anisimova, having now won all six career matches against her compatriot. Anisimova is the second player Pegula has beaten six times without a loss at the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz level in her career, joining Anastasia Potapova.<\/p>\n “Amanda is an amazing player, an amazing ball striker. I know I have a good record against her, but literally every single match is like it was today,” Pegula said in her on-court interview. “So I know I have to try and survive. Sometimes she can play lights-out tennis where there’s not much you can do, like in the second set.<\/p>\n “But I think was able to start getting some momentum at the end of that set and take it into the third and get ahead. It still wasn’t enough, but I got there.”<\/p>\n Pegula keeps up her third-set heroics<\/p>\n As has become her calling card over the past couple seasons, Pegula got the job done Thursday in three sets. But this latest victory was more unorthodox than the rest, with the injury buzz followed by her scorcher of an opening to the decider.<\/p>\n After Pegula took a 3-0 lead, Anisimova broke out a beautiful running forehand winner, bringing the ball back from outside the doubles alley and placing it directly on the line to break back for 3-1. A few games later, she broke again for 5-all with a backhand winner.<\/p>\n Pegula’s own forehand winner sealed the hold for 6-6, sending the match to a deciding tiebreak, where the two traded blows back and forth. But a 27-shot rally — the longest of the match — going in Pegula’s favor shifted the tides.<\/p>\n “I started laughing halfway through the point. I was like this is crazy, I can’t believe this rally is still going on,” Pegula said. “I’m really good at that. I think that’s something anybody would tell you, that one of my strengths is I’m able to absorb pace really well. I think that’s something I use well against Amanda.<\/p>\n “She likes to set up and hit her shots, and I’m able to absorb it and keep her moving, and I think that’s when I usually play my best against her.”<\/p>\n Anisimova made one last push with a forehand pass for 4-3, but Pegula won the final four points to earn her 16th three-set win of the season.<\/p>\n It serves as a milestone victory for Pegula, who becomes just the second American after Serena Williams (104) to claim 100 wins in hard-court WTA 1000 events since the format’s introduction in 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having taken the first set in her Cincinnati quarterfinal Thursday, Jessica Pegula quickly found herself trailing 3-0 in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":["post-820471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820471","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=820471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}