(September 4, 2024) FLUSHING, NY – In Jessica Pegula’s case, the seventh time is the charm. The No. 6 seed stunned No. 1 Iga Swiatek 6-2, 6-4 on Wednesday night to reach the semifinals of a major tournament for the first time ever on her seventh try.
“Thank god I was able to do it, and finally…finally! I can say semifinalist,” she said, in her on-court interview. “To do it primetime, in Ashe, against the No. 1 player in the world, it’s crazy. But I knew I could do it, I just had to go out and execute my game.”
She’ll be facing unseeded Karolina Muchova for a place in the finals next.
“She’s so good, so talented, so athletic, I love how she just doesn’t play [due to injury] and just comes out and beats everybody,” Pegula said of the Czech “She’s a really good player. I know she has a lot of experience going deep in Slams as well, so I’m going to have to bring my tennis. I’ll worry about that, maybe when I wake up in the morning.”
With Emma Navarro, Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz all winning, it marks the first time since 2003 that two US women and two US men have reached the US Open final four.
“I would like to say I’m so happy that you guys cannot ask me about making it to the semis,” she said to media in her news conference. “That was, like, oh, my gosh. It wasn’t even a me thing. It was more people asking me. I’m really happy to be through to the semifinals.
“I thought I played, yeah, a really clean match, served pretty well, returned well. I feel like I didn’t really do anything that bad, and was able to kind of jump on her really early and I think frustrate her, and was able to keep my level even when she picked it up in the second set.
“Yeah, I think I just played all-around really good tennis today.”
“It’s just, like, winning a big match… There’s a lot of other variables; beating her, No. 1 player in the world, Ashe, prime time, trying to make a semifinal, knowing that I’m up, knowing that I’m playing well, I’m giving myself a really good opportunity,” she added.
“But, I mean, I’ve had some really good wins, I feel like, the last couple of weeks, and been playing some really good tennis. So at the same time, I still was pretty relaxed and felt like I was going to be able to get the job done.”
“Well, for sure, it wasn’t a good performance from myself, ” Swiatek said. “But Jessie used it, so she played better, I played worse, and she won.”
“It’s never easy to play against Jess. She has a tricky ball because it’s pretty low and pretty flat.
“But I wouldn’t say she changed like a lot, because it’s impossible to change her game style, but for sure she was for sure, like, more solid than me and making much less mistakes. So because of that, she was kind of putting, you know, pressure with that. But usually I’m able to push it back or put pressure on myself, but today I just made too many mistakes.”
The woman from Poland talked about coming into the tournament with lower expectations: “Well, I’m always trying to have lower expectations, because I know that, like, any of us can win this tournament, and it’s not going to be easy, you know. And also, I feel like when I have high expectations, I never perform well. So I try to lower them. It’s not like it’s just low and that’s it, you know, because it’s hard to have low expectations when everybody is expecting something from you, and you kind of know that you might have a game to play well, you know.
“But for sure, I mean, I remember how it was last year, and, you know, I’m not gonna just expect from myself that I’m always going to win. I’m more just focusing on the work. And it’s more of an answer, because when I talk to you guys, because everybody is always, like, speaking about results straightaway when you go to a tournament, they want to know what my goal is, I don’t know, winning the final, the semifinal, and it’s just not it, you know. These are not my goals when I go in a tournament.
That’s my answer kind of, because I want to explain that I don’t expect from myself the results. I’m more expecting that I’m going to work and I’m going to go through some problems and work on them, and that’s it.”
More to follow…
