Iga Swiatek and Barbora Krejcikova will play in the Saturday's final of Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships for the first WTA 1000 title of the season.
Swiatek was a clear favorite in her today's semifinal played against Cori Gauff. The American has never won a set in all of her previous 5 matches against Swiatek and nor did that today as well. Swiatek won 6-4 6-2 in 1.5 hours, but the match was quite shaky from both sides. The Pole, who suffers a little bit from a cold, was a bit shaky in terms of making unforced errors, and showed the weaker serving performance than in all of her previous matches during the middle-east swing. At the end, it was more than enough to have a full control of the match against Gauff, who still waits to win a single set against the current WTA ranking's leader. The American did not performed well enough to threaten Swiatek, as made 37 unforced errors in compare to just 12 winners, with very low first serve accuracy - 43%. Swiatek surprisingly had also negative ratio 15 winners to 22 unforced errors.
Barbora Krejcikova lives a fabulous week in Dubai. The Czech was clearly on wave in her semifinal against Jessica Pegula after defeating Aryna Sabalenka in yesterday's quarterfinal, where she fought back from the score 0-6 1-3 to win the whole match and force the current Australian Open champion to experience the first loss of the season. Krejcikova dominated the first set, winning it 6-1 after just 29 minutes. Second set was a comeback from Pegula, who was much more reliable on serve, fighting till the end and forcing the decider after the winning the 65 minutes long set with a score 7-5, by gaining the decisive break in 12th game to love. The momentum switched again on the favour of Krejcikova, who raised her game to enormous level, winning easily every game after another and dominated the decisive set, winning it 6-0.
Tomorrow's final foreshadows a great tennis show. Swiatek will be a confident favorite on paper, but the fans can remember their last meeting in the final of WTA 500 Ostrava in October 2022. Krejcikova fought an impressive win in one of the best high-quality matches of the year in WTA, taking the trophy in her home country tournament after 3:18 hours of impressive three-sets battle.
