Daria Kasatkina will finish where necessary – Newspaper Kommersant No. 197 (7398) of 10/22/2022

The final tournament of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which will be held from October 31 to November 7 in Fort Worth (Texas), for the first time since 2016 will be held with the participation of at least one Russian woman – Roland Garros semi-finalist Daria Kasatkina. Despite losing to her compatriot Anna Kalinskaya in the 1/8 finals of the Guadalajara Open Akron, a 1000 tournament with a prize pool of $2.5 million, she guaranteed herself a place in the top eight tennis players at the end of this season.

The confusing situation with the drawing of free tickets to the WTA Finals, which arose before the start of the tournament in Guadalajara, was almost completely resolved on Thursday following the results of the 1/8 finals. Pole Iga Swiatek, Tunisian Uns Jabir and American Jessica Pegula in the list of participants in the final competition of the year were joined by another representative of the United States Coco Gauff, Frenchwoman Caroline Garcia, Belarusian Arina Sobolenko and Russian Daria Kasatkina. The last place in the top eight tennis players in 2022 late at night Moscow time was to be played in the full-time quarterfinals by Russian Veronika Kudermetova and Greek Maria Sakkari. Its winner got the right to play at the WTA Finals (Kudermetova, however, will perform in Fort Worth in doubles with the Belgian Elise Mertens), and the loser became the first substitute there.

The fact that even a defeat from compatriot Anna Kalinskaya would not prevent Darya Kasatkina from solving her main task of this week became clear even before the start of their meeting – after the former first racket of the world Victoria Azarenka outplayed American Madison Keys in three sets, who retained theoretical chances to hit to Texas. As a result, Kalinskaya, who, by the way, has performed better than ever in recent months and has established herself in the middle of the first hundred, won with a score of 6:2, 2:6, 6:3.

For the 23-year-old Russian woman, who coped at the start with last year’s Roland Garros champion Barbora Kreichikova and made it to the quarterfinals of the 1000 category tournament for the first time, this is a very big success.

It’s time for Daria Kasatkina to sum up the intermediate results of this season, also the most successful in her career. It cannot be said that the Russian woman performed stably throughout the year. Having spent 22 tournaments, she dropped out at the very start in six of them, and won only one match in four more. Nevertheless, Kasatkina also had bright, unconditional successes. First of all, this is the first entry into the semifinals of the Grand Slam championship – Roland Garros, where, by the way, Veronika Kudermetova was her rival in the quarterfinals. These are two titles won in the summer on the American hard in San Jose and Granby. It is also the semi-final of a very prestigious tournament – the Roman Italian Open. In these four tournaments, Kasatkina has won two-thirds of the points she has earned since January—1,880 out of 2,935.

For an elite tennis player, this is a relatively small amount. According to the results of any other previous season, without scoring 3,000 points, Kasatkina would have been outside the top ten, but here we must take into account the Wimbledon factor, which this year due to denial players from Russia and Belarus, even under a neutral flag, were not awarded rating points. In any case, under the guidance of her Spanish coach Carlos Martinez, who has been coaching her for more than three years, Kasatkina has now made great progress. Recallthat, having finished 2018 in the top ten, it then experienced a protracted decline, stood in the second fifty in a row for two seasons in a row, and only last year found a way out of the crisis, rising to 26th place.

And, of course, it should also be noted that Kasatkina became the first Russian woman to be on the list of WTA Finals participants since 2016, when Svetlana Kuznetsova performed in Singapore, yielding in the semi-finals of the future Slovak champion Dominika Cibulkova. As for the current winner of the tournament, Spaniard Garbine Muguruza, she is only 49th in terms of points scored this season.

Evgeny Fedyakov