Top seed Simona Halep sent Caroline Garcia packing for the second consecutive year at the Rogers Cup in Montreal on Friday with a 7-5 6-1 win to set up a semi-final showdown with Ashleigh Barty on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The French Open champion showed no signs of fatigue following her marathon three-set win over Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova on Wednesday, running down balls to extend points and wear down the slower Garcia.<\/p>\n
After a shaky start Halep won three straight games to take the first set and dominated the second set behind pinpoint serving and stout defense.<\/p>\n
Next up for Halep is Australian Ashleigh Barty, who strolled to a 6-3 6-1 win over Kiki Bertens in their quarter-final match earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
The 15th-seeded Barty won 80 percent of her first serve points and broke Bertens four times as she cruised to victory.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s semi-final will mark the first career meeting between Halep and Barty.<\/p>\n
American Sloane Stephens faced little resistance in her 6-2 6-2 win over Latvia\u2019s Anastasija Sevastova in a match that took a little over an hour to complete.<\/p>\n
With the win Stephens advances to her second consecutive Rogers Cup semi-final after falling to Caroline Wozniacki last year.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old U.S. Open champion will look to add her second hard court title of the year after she won the Miami Open in March.<\/p>\n
But to do so she will have to get past defending champion Elina Svitolina after she dispatched Elise Mertens 7-5 6-3 on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Top seed Simona Halep sent Caroline Garcia packing for the second consecutive year at the Rogers Cup in Montreal on Friday with a 7-5 6-1 win to set up a semi-final showdown with Ashleigh Barty on Saturday. The French Open champion showed no signs of fatigue following her marathon three-set win over Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38885,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38886,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38884\/revisions\/38886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}