Preview US Open 2024 Women’s semifinals: Favorite Aryna Sabalenka meets local hero Emma Navarro

The first semifinal match of the US Open will be played between Emma Navarro and Aryna Sabalenka. Check out our match preview to see exactly what could happen in this match.

Emma Navarro is a player who is not very well known in tennis circles, although she has been around for a while. She spent much of her early career playing matches at ITF level, which allowed her to make a smooth transition to the WTA tour. There, the American immediately became one of the better players and quickly climbed the rankings.

This year was the first year she was consistently ranked among the top players and she has done really well. With her recent success at the US Open, Navarro has broken into the top 10, which is an important milestone for a player who not so long ago was not even ranked in the top 100.

However, everything she has achieved is a direct product of her work, because she has worked really hard and earned her wins the hard way. Even that semifinal in New York was not easy, she had to fight through the matches. Perhaps her win against Paula Badosa was even her easiest match overall because it didn’t go the full distance. She is a very interesting player in the context of modern tennis. She doesn’t have the overwhelming power like other players, but she is quite aggressive.

She is a very clever player who uses different ways to win a point and is also not afraid to really go forward. It is great to have a player who mixes things up as much as she does because as exciting as hard tennis is, sometimes it gets a bit repetitive. There are few tennis matches where Sabalenka gets her forehands through at a higher speed than the ATP players. This hard hitting style is what bothers Navarro the most. We saw that against Marta Kostyuk, who almost beat her.

If she comes up against a player who is a very natural hitter and hits the ball very hard, she can get into trouble. You have to improvise and wait for mistakes because she can’t hit through a player.

This doesn’t happen even against weaker opponents, let alone against players as strong as Aryna Sabalenka. What are her chances of reaching the final? That’s a very good question, because they’re not that great. If there’s one player she doesn’t want to play against, it’s probably Sabalenka, but that goes for all tennis players. The Belarusian tennis player played and looked so strong.

She won the Cincinnati Open without dropping a single set, dominating some pretty big names along the way. She beat both Iga Swiatek and Jessica Pegula, who also went deep in this draw. We can also safely say that she is the best player of the last 2-3 weeks. What works for Sabalenka has always worked for her, and that is power. She is just too overwhelming for her opponents, especially on returns.

What has changed recently compared to before is that she hits the ball very consistently. For a few years she had that power, but one of those balls went wide or into the net. Nowadays she hits several balls in a row with no problem and even clears the lines. That kind of precision and wit makes her a nightmare on a court like this. Add to that her serve, which has also been very good recently, and you have a player who is almost impossible to beat.

And yet, Emma Navarro did it earlier this year. It happened at the Indian Wells Masters, and it was well received because Sabalenka was playing pretty poorly. She struggled with her timing and hit a lot of balls long, which was the only way to beat Navarro.

You can’t really engage in a slugfest with her. You have to shake things up and change the tempo a lot so that Sabalenka makes a lot of mistakes. If she does that, she’s close to winning, but if she doesn’t, then you’re in trouble. You’re going to be in trouble anyway, so you might as well try something outrageous. That’s exactly what you have to do against the best players in the world.

Another reason why Sabalenka lost this match was that it was her first time facing Navarro. The American has an interesting style that can be a little confusing. The next time they met was on clay in Rome, and Sabalenka was able to win that match much more easily, beating her in two easy sets. Most people expect something similar to happen here, and that’s only logical. Everything we’ve seen from the players so far suggests that it will be a very tough match for the American.

They have played excellent tennis, but it is mainly a matchup issue. There is not much she can do against a player like Sabalenka. The serve will be the most important part of her game.

If she doesn’t serve well and give Sabalenka a lot of chances on serve, she will be destroyed. That’s exactly what happened to Qinwen Zheng because the first serve was just too bad. Navarro went up and down with her serve and that won’t be good enough. She will have to be brilliant to win and time will tell if she can do that.

Overall, it should be an interesting semifinal because the crowd will be excited. They will be cheering for an American player and Navarro is a native New Yorker, so there is that connection as well. Overall, it should be a good match, with Sabalenka the clear favorite. Whether she wins, however, will be seen on the day of the match, September 5, 2024.