Top-seeded Iga Swiatek and Karolina Muchova survive a wild Thursday, earning trips to the final at Roland Garros after three-set thrillers.
But just when the final looked as if it could end up as Karolina Muchova against Beatriz Haddad Maia, which would make it necessary to remind people to practice good manners and appreciate the semi-anonymous, No. 1 Iga Swiatek intervened. She rebuffed a set point that might have hurled her into a woolly third set filled with who-knows-what. She gave the women’s game another turn of its recent coherence.The French Open dream semi is on: Carlos Alcaraz vs.
Nobody really knew what to say except perhaps to state the need for a nap. Muchova and second-ranked Aryna Sabalenka played their 7-6 , 6-7 , 7-5 donnybrook for 3 hours 13 minutes of chronic uncertainty about who had control. That included the moment when Sabalenka held a match point, up 5-2 in the third set. Then somehow, the Australian Open champion and 25-year-old power station, poised to get people to start talking about the calendar Grand Slam, lost 20 of the next 24 points to head home.
Sabalenka didn’t lose the match point in any way that would seem to linger — Muchova cracked an inside-out forehand for a clean winner — but she played as if she had netted a sitter or something. At 5-3, she lost her serve at 15. Errors sprang. “After I lost my serve,” it began to get away, she said. “I was serving for the match, so I think after that game she kind of stepped in and started playing a little bit more aggressive, and I kind of, yeah, lost my rhythm. Yeah, I wasn’t there.
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