Australia’s Samantha Stosur, the 30th seed, beat unseeded Romanian teenager Sorana Cirstea 6-1, 6-3 at the French Open yesterday to qualify for her first Grand Slam semi-final.
Stosur will play either US second seed Serena Williams or Russian seventh seed Svetlana Kuznetsova for a place in the final, in what will be the first Roland Garros semi-final appearance for an Australian woman since Nicole Provis in 1988.
Cirstea, 19, had beaten three seeds, including Serbian world No. 5 Jelena Jankovic, en route to the last eight, but a nervous double-fault saw her broken in her first service game.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The big-serving Stosur, ranked 32 in the world, then broke again when Cirstea scooped a crosscourt forehand wide before serving out for the set in 27 minutes.
A more tenacious Cirstea forced Stosur to save four break points in the opening game of the second set, before the Australian broke for a 2-1 lead.
Stosur’s advantage stretched to 4-1 when Cirstea sliced a backhand into the tramlines in her next service game, with the Australian surviving a late rally from her opponent before breaking again to close out the match.
Should Stosur make the final, she will be the first Australian woman to do so since Wendy Turnbull in 1979.
The last Australian women’s champion at the French Open was Margaret Smith-Court in 1973.
On Tuesday, Chilean 12th seed Fernando Gonzalez reached his first French Open semi-final after a 6-3, 3-6, 6-0, 6-4 victory over British third seed Andy Murray on Tuesday.
World No. 12 Gonzalez will meet 23rd seed Robin Soderling in the last four, the Swede having beaten Russian 10th seed Nikolay Davydenko in straight sets in his quarter-final.
Gonzalez, who hadn’t dropped a set before his encounter with Murray, will now bid to reach his first Grand Slam final since his runner-up appearance at the 2007 Australian Open.
“I was playing really hard and I tried to dominate with my forehand,” Gonzalez said. “I know he’s not used to the ball bouncing high because he doesn’t play on clay much.”
Murray conceded that the Chilean’s powerful forehand had made the difference.
“I have to give him a lot of credit,” the 22-year-old said.
“I’ve played against him before and he hits it hard, but today he was hitting it huge. It’s easy to look from the side and think you could have done this, you could have done that, but the guy was just hitting it so hard,” Murray said. “The start of the third set was disappointing. I had a couple of chances to hold serve and I didn’t take them, and at the end of the match I played poor.”
A strong start from Gonzalez forced Murray to save four break points in his first service game and the Chilean survived a break point on his own serve before breaking in game eight with a whipped forehand from the net.
There was to be no way back in the first set for Murray, the world No. 3, who survived two set points before the 28-year-old Gonzalez wrapped things up with a crashing forehand down the line.
The final score of Maria Sharapova’s stunning loss in the women’s quarter-finals on Tuesday did not look quite as embarrassing as it nearly did: Her opponent led 6-0, 5-0.
That Sharapova saved a match point in the 12th game and wound up delaying her defeat for 15 minutes was of no consolation, of course. All that mattered was that her bid to complete a career Grand Slam this year ended when she was beaten 6-0, 6-2 by 20th-seeded Dominika Cibulkova.
“I don’t really care about numbers. It’s either a ‘W’ or an ‘L,’” Sharapova said, “and I prefer ‘W.’”
All of that time on court at the French Open, and all of that time away before it, finally caught up to her, resulting in her most lopsided loss at a major tournament.
“You can only ask your body to do so much,” said Sharapova, who had right shoulder surgery in October and had played four three-set matches at Roland Garros in her first major tournament in nearly a year. “Everything fell a little short today. The pace wasn’t there on my strokes, and, you know, I was five steps slower.”
Her absence from the tour dropped her ranking outside the top 100. Still, as a former No. 1 and a three-time major champion, Sharapova was expected to beat Cibulkova, a 20-year-old Slovak who was making her Grand Slam quarter-final debut and whose chief financial backer is not a shoe company or a racket manufacturer but, instead, a friend of her coach from back home in Bratislava.
Now Cibulkova faces the current No. 1, Dinara Safina, who overcame a shaky start to defeat No. 9 Victoria Azarenka of Belarus 1-6, 6-4, 6-2.
Neither Cibulkova nor her coach, Vladimir Platenik, thought she played perfectly.
“Regular,” was the word Platenik used when they huddled in the hallway outside the locker room at Court Suzanne Lenglen.
“I told you!” Platenik said. “I told you if you played regular, you could do it!”
She certainly did.
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