“I tried to play my best, but Flavia played unbelievable and I have to say congrats to her”.
Fresh off her remarkable upset win over Serena Williams, Roberta Vinci will face childhood rival Flavia Pennetta later Saturday. Vinci said she will be better prepared and certainly more confident this time around.
“And so this one was my last match at the U.S. Open and I couldn’t think to finish a better way”.
“Sometimes it’s getting hard for me to compete”, Pennetta said. “I don’t know how to handle all the pressure I have, but I think I played really well”.
Errani finished runner-up at the 2012 French Open and Pennetta reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open for the first time a year later.
Simona Halep is set to meet Flavia Pennetta.
The final set was a thriller but the Italian never wavered and one break was all it took for her to win what was probably the most important game of her career.
Asked during her news conference if she was any relation to Leonardo da Vinci, she had to give a disappointed shake of the head.
Pennetta, who’d won both her previous grand slam encounters with Vinci and enjoyed a 5-4 head-to-head edge overall entering the final, powered to a 4-0 lead second set before breaking her good friend for a fourth time to reign as the queen of Queens.
“He said: ‘You won’t understand what will happen now in Italy”.
Pennetta decided about a month ago she would be retiring after this season, and this would be her last appearance at Flushing Meadows.
The 43rd-ranked Italian won 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 in the U.S. Open semifinals Friday. Two Italians reach the grand slam final – a miracle.
“I love that I’m a full woman and I am strong, and I’m powerful, and I’m lovely at the same time, and there’s nothing wrong like that”, she said. And one Italian won a major title.
Neither player were forceful enough to make another breakthrough and the set drifted into a tie-break, where Pennetta made her extra quality from the baseline count.
Pennetta only told her teen roommate and surrogate sister Vinci she would retire just before the awards ceremony.
If she can collect a fifth consecutive major championship this weekend, Williams would raise her career total to 22, equaling Graf for the most in the Open era, which began in 1968, and second-most in history, behind Margaret Court’s 24.
The world No. 1 is chasing history, having recently completed her second “Serena Slam” at Wimbledon – four back-to-back Grand Slam titles since the 2014 US Open.
The demolition was the worst ever in a U.S. Open semi-final, the three games lost one fewer than the four Yevgeny Kafelnikov managed against Lleyton Hewitt in 2001.
And why not? Look how far these two have come, from opponents as kids in local youth tournaments in Italy, to opponents as 30-somethings in the U.S. Open final Saturday, half a world away. But the BBC said Pennetta clarified her statement, saying she’s not throwing in the towel until the end of the year.