With Top Four Seeds Gone, Women’s Draw is Wide Open

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The New York Sun

No. 1 is gone. So is no. 2. The French Open champion and the Wimbledon champion left days ago and the Williams sisters were done soon after that.


Still, the U.S. Open has some headline players set for Friday’s women’s semifinal matches, with the no. 1 ranking hanging on the outcome.


No. 5 Lindsay Davenport faces no. 9 Svetlana Kuznetsova and no. 8 Jennifer Capriati plays no. 6 Elena Dementieva, with the winners advancing to Saturday night’s final.


They are the survivors after defending champion Justine Henin-Hardenne, no. 2 Amelie Mauresmo, no. 3 Serena Williams, French Open champion Anastasia Myskina, and Wimbledon winner Maria Sharapova all bowed out of the tournament.


This is the first time in the Open Era that none of the top four women’s seeds have made it to the semifinals of the U.S. Open.


Still, the matchups offer considerable intrigue, especially for Davenport, seeking her second U.S. Open championship.


Kuznetsova, Dementieva, and Capriati have never played for the U.S. Open title. The stakes are highest, however, for Davenport, the 1998 winner, who arrived at the season’s final Grand Slam event as the hottest player on the women’s tour, with four straight hard-court tournament victories.


She has won 22 consecutive matches and if she wins this event, she will claim the no. 1 ranking in women’s tennis.


If Davenport loses to either Kuznetsova or in the final, then the top spot goes to Mauresmo, who lost in the quarterfinals to Dementieva and has never won a Grand Slam tournament.


Since losing to Sharapova in the semifinals at Wimbledon, Davenport has dropped just three sets and swept events at Stanford, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Cincinnati leading up to the Open. She has won the last 16 sets she has played and waited out day-long rains before defeating Shinobu Asagoe 6-1, 6-1 in just 46 minutes in the quarterfinals on Wednesday.


“At about 6-1, 5-1, I thought, ‘if it rains now, I’m going to die,”‘ Davenport said. “Then I started to hurry it up a bit.”


Kuznetsova, just 19, has never been this far in a Grand Slam event. But she earned her way here by defeating Nadia Petrova in the quarters after Petrova sent Henin-Hardenne home. Kuznetsova won the Wimbledon warmup at Eastbourne, defeating Vera Zvonareva and Daniela Hantuchova in the last two rounds. She also has wins over Venus Williams, Amy Frazier, Dementieva, and Henin-Hardenne this summer and has never faced Davenport before.


It has been an up-and-down season for Dementieva, who lost in the semis at the Open in 2000. She was a first-round loser in both the Australian Open and Wimbledon but reached the finals of the French Open before losing to Myskina. Against Mauresmo, she struggled with an aching thigh that was heavily wrapped and dehydration which required IV fluids after the match.


“My leg is getting better, especially with the day off,” she said. “I feel OK with the day to recover. It’s going to be a tough match for me. She just beat Serena. She has a very solid game. I’ll try to play my game. There is nothing I can change. I need to be focused. I need to be aggressive.”


Capriati, who lost a memorable semifinal to Henin-Hardenne at the Open a year ago, owns three Grand Slam titles and has reached 13 Slam semifinals, most recently in the French Open, where she lost to Myskina. But she hasn’t played for a Slam title since the 2002 Australian Open and is without any championships this season.


Capriati has swept all three meetings with Dementieva, all on hard-court.


The New York Sun

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