Australia\u2019s Ashleigh Barty crushed French Open winner Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia 6-3, 6-0 on Friday, cruising into the final at the Wuhan Open.<\/p>\n
Barty, who began the year ranked outside the top 300, will face Caroline Garcia in her first ever Premier 5 tournament final after the French player toppled Greece\u2019s Maria Sakkari 6-3, 6-2 in a one-way semifinal.<\/p>\n
Ostapenko, ranked 10 in the world, struggled with a niggle to her right wrist and appeared tired after triumphing over world number one Garbine Muguruza in the quarters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no energy,\u201d Ostapenko, 20, told journalists.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been playing so many matches… and yesterday we finished quite late so I didn\u2019t really have enough time to recover.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barty, ranked 37th in the world, snatched an early break in the first set to lead her normally fiery opponent 2-0. Ostapenko broke back but the Australian moved ahead again in the sixth game and held on to close the first set in just under an hour.<\/p>\n
After breaking early in the second, Barty stormed ahead to the finishing line in less than 30 minutes.<\/p>\n
Barty had already seen off former world number one Karolina Pliskova, Agnieszka Radwanska, seeded nine, and Johanna Konta, the fifth seed in a dream run in the Chinese city.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been an unbelievable week. I\u2019ve played some really good tennis at a really consistent level throughout the match and haven\u2019t had any real drops,\u201d 21-year-old Barty said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m moving well on the court. I feel like I have full control of the ball, which in some conditions it\u2019s really tough to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the other semi-final, Garcia dominated qualifier Sakkari to reach her first final of the year and the first Premier 5 level final of her career.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels good, it was a long time without a final,\u201d Garcia said in an interview on court after the match.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was such a fight today, and she had a great week coming from qualifiers, and I\u2019m very happy with the way I played.\u201d<\/p>\n
Garcia, ranked 20 in the world, had earlier triumphed over Dominika Cibulkova, seeded seven, and number 12 seed Angelique Kerber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australia\u2019s Ashleigh Barty crushed French Open winner Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia 6-3, 6-0 on Friday, cruising into the final at the Wuhan Open. Barty, who began the year ranked outside the top 300, will face Caroline Garcia in her first ever Premier 5 tournament final after the French player toppled Greece\u2019s Maria Sakkari 6-3, 6-2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6397,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6396","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\/6396","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=6396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6398,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6396\/revisions\/6398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}