Serena Williams vs. Roberta Vinci takes place tonight in the semi-finals of the 2015 US Open.
This US Open match is scheduled to start at 00:00 BST.
Preview:
Two veterans face off for a place in the final of the US Open as Serena Williams, two matches away from perhaps her greatest accomplishment, takes on the somewhat overmatched Roberta Vinci.
There’s no denying that the draw has opened up somewhat for Roberta Vinci to make her first Grand Slam semifinal at the age of 32 – of the five opponents she has played so far, only quarterfinal opponent Kristina Mladenovic (ranked world no. 40) stands inside the world’s top 75 WTA Tour players. Vinci, ranked 43 in the world, has always played some of her best tennis at the US Open – she was a quarterfinalist in 2012 and 2013 – but the Italian had slid from inside the world’s top 20 to only just inside the top 50 in 2014 and although her ranking fall stabilized in 2015, her results this season have been average, with a runner-up finish in Nurnberg and quarterfinals in Hobart, Istanbul and Toronto the highlights.
‘Well, I played good in Toronto; Cincinnati started to play much better,’ Vinci said. ‘But when you play the Grand Slams, always tough and you have a lot of pressure because there are so many points and so you can reach – you can improve your ranking. But I think I have also good draw, because Suarez lost, Jankovic the same, Bouchard. So maybe this was my tournament. I don’t know. Sometimes it can happen.’
Vinci’s run in Toronto, where the highest-ranked player she faced on the way to the quarterfinals was world no. 35 Karin Knapp, was ended by Serena Williams and it looks like the Italian’s US Open will end in precisely the same way.
If the draw has opened up for Vinci, you can’t really say the same for Serena as she tries to make history by completing the calendar-year Grand Slam and tying Steffi Graf’s Open Era record of 22 Slam titles. Bethanie Mattek-Sands may have been a wildcard, but she gave Serena an almighty scare in the third round and Williams had to go on to face Australian Open semifinalist Madison Keys and big sister Venus – a tough draw by anybody’s standards. Against the latter in the quarterfinals, Serena dropped her second set of the tournament before steadying for a hard-fought 6-2, 1-6, 6-3 victory.
That win has put Serena just two matches away from her greatest accomplishment yet, and although she knows there are major challenges ahead – Petra Kvitova, one of two women to have beaten her in 2015, world no. 2 Simona Halep and Victoria Azarenka, who has twice pushed Serena to three sets in US Open finals, are all still alive in the draw at the time of writing – she must be feeling good about her semifinal encounter with Vinci, where with all due respect to the Italian, Serena’s biggest opponent is once again her own nerves.
Serena and Vinci have played four times and Serena leads the head-to-head 4-0, having never conceded a set to the Italian – indeed, she has lost a maximum of seven games per match to Vinci, most recently beating her 6-4, 6-3 in Toronto.
