Erin Routliffe has reached her first semi-final at a tennis grand slam after pulling off a remarkable comeback with partner Gaby Dabrowski at the US Open this morning.
Kiwi Routliffe and her Canadian partner took down the USA's Taylor Townsend and Canada's Leylah Annie Fernandez in three sets this morning at Louis Armstrong Stadium to advance to the semis.
After losing the first set but coming back in the second, the match came down to a tiebreak in the final set where crowd favourites Townsend and Fernandez seemed to have their spot in the semis locked up after surging to a commanding 7-2 lead.
However, Routliffe and Dabrowski stormed back to win the next five points, helped by back-to-back double faults from Townsend and an ace from the Kiwi, and eventually took the set and with it the match in just over two and a half hours, keeping their first run at a major as a team alive.
"I'm a little in shock," Routliffe said shortly after the match.
The duo will play the winner of the quarter-final between American third seeds Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula and Taiwan's Su-Wei Hsieh and Xinyu Wang of China, who are seeded eighth.
Elsewhere, Gauff dealt just fine with the heat, the humidity, her big-hitting opponent and the task of trying to reach the US Open semifinals for the first time in the women's singles, defeating 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko 6-0, 6-2.
Gauff, a 19-year-old from Florida, is the first American teenager to reach the final four at Flushing Meadows since Serena Williams was the runner-up to her older sister, Venus, in 2001.
“Last year, I lost in the quarterfinal stage, and I wanted to do better this year,” Gauff said. “Still have a long way to go, but I'm happy and I'm ready to get back to work for the next one.”
In today's first men's quarterfinal, which was played with the Arthur Ashe Stadium roof partly closed to offer some shade to fans and players with the temperature above 32 degrees and the humidity above 50%, 23-time major champion Novak Djokovic of Serbia defeated No. 9 Taylor Fritz of the United States 6-1, 6-4, 6-4.
Djokovic improved to 8-0 against Fritz and 13-0 in US Open quarterfinals, while making it to his 47th Grand Slam semifinal overall, breaking a tie with Roger Federer for the most by a man.
Djokovic will now meet No. 10 Frances Tiafoe or unseeded Ben Shelton, who had joined Fritz in making this the first time since 2005 that three US men were in the final eight in New York.
- Additional reporting by the Associated Press
SHARE ME