Lyudmila Samsonova and Daria Kasatkina reached the semi-finals of the WTA tournament in Abu Dhabi

The Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open, a $922,000 Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) 500 tournament heading towards its climax in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, has the Russians in the spotlight. Lyudmila Samsonova will meet in the semi-finals with ex-Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, who has never lost to her in four previous meetings, and the rival of Russia’s first racket Daria Kasatkina will be the leader of South American women’s tennis, Brazilian Beatriz Haddad Maia.

Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open is a fairly young tournament that is being held for the third time. It first took place in January 2021, when the WTA calendar was changed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and last season after the cancellation of the Russian St. The Petersburg Ladies Trophy has already taken a permanent place in the list of competitions on the women’s professional tour, collecting a lineup of participants that is quite consistent with the level of the 500 category and a prize fund of $922 thousand.

This time, three tennis players from the top ten came to the capital of the UAE – Elena Rybakina (5th in the world), Uns Jabir (6th) and Maria Sakkari (9th), as well as five more people included in the top twenty .

Among them were three Russians – Daria Kasatkina, Lyudmila Samsonova and Veronika Kudermetova, who, starting from 14th position, stand one after another in the world classification. True, Kudermetova performed extremely poorly, immediately losing to the British Heather Watson, who was far outside the top hundred and was forced to make her way into the main draw through qualification.

Samsonova feels good on the courts of the Zayed Sports City International Tennis Center, where last year she managed to reach the final. She finished all three matches on the way to the semifinals – against two Ukrainian tennis players Lesya Tsurenko and Angelina Kalinina, and then the 12th world racket of the Czech Barbora Krejcikova – in two sets. It cannot be said that in these meetings the Russian woman looked perfect from beginning to end. Let’s say, at the end of both games of the quarterfinals, she gave up her serve once. But in general, Samsonova’s trump cards – first of all, a good serve and sharp shots from the baseline – work well on a fast surface in Abu Dhabi, and Krejcikova, with whom, by the way, she played there a year ago, but in the second round, managed to win quite confidently – 7:5, 6:4.

To confirm her last year’s result, Samsonova will have to solve a difficult task, because her opponent in the semifinals will be Elena Rybakina. She entered the fight from the second round, where she won a hard-fought victory over the 2022 Australian Open finalist, American Danielle Collins, who announced her intention to retire at the end of the season, but then quite easily beat Cristina Buksa, a representative of Spain of Moldovan origin. The ratio of personal meetings – 4:0 – seems to clearly speak in favor of the Russian, who the previous time beat Rybakina in the semi-finals of the 1000 category tournament in Beijing, but one should not be deluded by these statistics. The surface in Abu Dhabi suits the 2022 Wimbledon champion no worse than Samsonova, so for now we can only say that this week the Russian tennis player only somewhat smoothed out the unimpressive impression of her extremely unsuccessful January performance in Australia, where at the tournaments in Brisbane, She lost three matches in a row to Adelaide and Melbourne.

The second semi-final pairing was determined after sunset, which created problems for the tennis players when serving during the day’s matches on one side of the court. First, the Tunisian Uns Jabir left the tournament, who was beaten in two games by the 12th racket of the world, the Brazilian Beatrice Haddad Maia, and then Daria Kasatkina very easily dealt with the Romanian Sorana Cirstei – 6:2, 6:0. Having started the tournament with a marathon match against France’s Diane Parry, the Russian number one seemed to have adapted well to the conditions and played an excellent match against an opponent who can hit very powerfully but is extremely unstable. True, Kasatkina lost both meetings with the leader of South American women’s tennis last year, in Doha and Zhuhai.

Evgeniy Fedyakov