United Russian Emirates – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) dated 10.02.2023

At the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open held in the UAE, a Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) 500 tournament with a prize fund of $780,000, three Russian tennis players successfully perform at once. The eighth racket of the world Daria Kasatkina will fight for reaching the semi-finals with the Chinese woman Zheng Qinwen and, if she wins, she will meet with Veronika Kudermetova or Lyudmila Samsonova, who made up the second quarter-final pair in the same half of the bracket.

The WTA tournament in Abu Dhabi is held only for the second time. In 2021, he opened the season, serving as a replacement for one of the Chinese competitions, which did not take place due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now the women’s tennis tour has moved to the Middle East in early February due to the cancellation of Russia’s St. Petersburg Ladies Trophy. As a result, the region, which has an almost ideal climate for tennis at this time of the year, received a series of three high-level tournaments in a row. It was opened just by Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open, and traditional competitions will continue in Doha and Dubai.

For Daria Kasatkina, Veronika Kudermetova and Lyudmila Samsonova, three Russian top 20 WTA tennis players who were seeded in Abu Dhabi, this week is significant.

After an unsuccessful performance at the Australian Open, they need to improve, otherwise, after a while, a fall in the world classification is inevitable, where they took high places at the end of last year.

By the way, Kudermetova, by the end of January, has already left the top 10, where she is now trying to return. Kasatkina is still in the top ten quite firmly, but she will have to defend a large number of ranking points in the spring at the Italian and French Opens, and now it would be nice to make a solid reserve. Moreover, at the moment, the strongest of the Russians has the opportunity to update her own rating record: if she wins in Abu Dhabi, she will become the seventh racket of the world for the first time.

The first opponent of Kasatkina in Abu Dhabi was Jill Teichman, a well-known Swiss left-hander with a rather active, but not stable enough game. And at first one might think that Kasatkina still hasn’t recovered from the devastating defeat at the start of the Australian Open from her compatriot Varvara Gracheva, who then defeated her in Melbourne in less than an hour.

In fact, according to the Russian, her quick fiasco in the first game had a different reason. Just before that, she trained in Abu Dhabi exclusively during daylight hours and did not immediately adapt to the electric lighting turned on before the start of the meeting.

And then everything fell into place. Having played her crown tennis with a change of rhythm, Kasatkina began to take one game after another. As a result – 1:6, 6:0, 6:2. In the quarterfinals, she will meet with another tennis player from the top thirty – Chinese Zheng Qinwen, who, like Kasatkina, spends most of her time between tournaments in Barcelona. Last season, she made significant progress and has victories over such well-known opponents as former world No. 1 Romanian Simona Halep and Spaniard Paula Badosa.

Although the outcome of Kasatkina’s confrontation with Zheng Qinwen is not obvious, the semi-finals in the upper half of the grid will not do without the Russian presence anyway. The fact is that in another quarterfinal on Friday, Kudermetova and Samsonova will meet, who, by the way, this year began to act together in pairs, although so far without much success. Kudermetova, who played her first final at the WTA tournament two years ago in Abu Dhabi, managed to knock out her former doubles partner Eliza Mertens from the net on Wednesday, and on Thursday Samsonova coped with the Czech champion Roland Garros two years ago in a stubborn struggle. Barbora Kreychikova. The first game of their confrontation lasted 61 minutes, the second – almost an hour and a half, but in the end Samsonova took over from the sixth match point – 7:5, 7:6 (8:6). Of the three previous meetings of the current quarter-finalists, two remained with Kudermetova, but now the balance of power looks absolutely equal.

Evgeny Fedyakov