Aryna Sabalenka will play in the US Open final with Coco Gauff

Aryna Sabalenka and Coco Gauff will play in Saturday’s US Open women’s final, which ends in New York. This became clear after the American beat the Roland Garros finalist, Czech Karolina Muchova, in two sets, and the Belarusian, who on Monday will lead the world classification for the first time, having lost the first set dry, dealt with another US representative, Madison Keys, in a very difficult fight.

The second US Open women’s semi-final was rare in its passion and drama. Arina Sabalenka, having lost the first set – 0:6, lost to Madison Keys in the second – 3:5 and 0:15, but due to her own character and other people’s mistakes, she still managed to turn the tide of the fight and save an almost hopeless match. At times emotions were overwhelming. Sabalenka swore and threw rackets, receiving a reprimand from the chair umpire, and winning her seventh ball in the second tiebreak in a row, she began to rejoice at the victory, forgetting that in the decisive games of Grand Slam tournaments, tiebreakers are now played to ten points. But in the end, everything ended successfully for the Belarusian. She beat the experienced, gifted, aggressive, but extremely unstable Keys in just over two and a half hours – 0:6, 7:6 (7:1), 7:6 (10:5).

The first semi-final between Coco Gauff and Roland Garros finalist Karolina Muchova turned out to be much more bland, ending with a score of 6:4, 7:5. There was no more aggression here, but patience (these tennis players won only 28 points between them with blows straight through – less than Keys or Sabalenka individually), and besides, the American led from the first game to the last.

The most memorable episode of this meeting was associated not with tennis, but with a protest action by four environmental activists, one of whom, sitting on the podium, glued his feet to the floor.

It took doctors and police 50 minutes to remove this man from the arena.

To some, 19-year-old Gauff’s appearance in the final may seem unexpected, but this, of course, is not at all the case. The last weeks on the American hard court are the best period of her career. The black American has a title in Washington, a quarterfinal in Montreal, another title in Cincinnati, where, by the way, she also beat Muchova in the decisive match, and now at least the New York final. Stability has finally come to the young tennis player, who has actually been in the public eye for several seasons now, and last year reached the decisive stage of Roland Garros. And it’s far from a fact that on Saturday Sabalenka should definitely be considered the favorite, especially since the score of personal matches – 3:2 – is not in her favor.

Gauff is able to counter Sabalenka’s power with her rather dense and tactically varied game, based on a high degree of confidence.

Having fully experienced all the delights of rivalry with the Americans on the 23,000-seat Arthur Ashe court, the Belarusian at a press conference in New York did not hide the fact that in the final it would be more convenient for her to play with Muchova. But even if Sabalenka, who won this year’s Australian Open, fails to take her second major title, the outcome of her dispute with Poland’s Iga Swiatek for first place in the rankings at the end of the season is almost a foregone conclusion. On Monday, the Minsk resident’s gap from her closest pursuer in the classification will be at least 1,305 points, and it is unlikely that Sabalenka, who has generally shown fairly stable results this year, will lose this advantage.

If Gauff wins, she will become the fourth tennis player after Sabalenka, Shwiatek and Elena Rybakina, representing Kazakhstan, to secure a ticket to the final tournament of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which, as it became known recently, will be hosted by Cancun, Mexico. However, de facto, both she and her compatriot Jessica Pegula have already gotten there. But for the remaining three tickets, the main contenders for which are Czech Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova, Karolina Muchova and Tunisian Uns Jabir, there is still a fight going on. By the way, Madison Keys is able to intervene in it.

Evgeniy Fedyakov