No.3 seed Marie Bouzkova and unseeded Katerina Siniakova set up an all-Czech final at the Jiangxi Open in Nanchang, China after straight-sets semifinal wins on Saturday.
Bouzkova delivered a watertight defensive performance to overhaul Diana Shnaider 7-6(5), 6-2 in 1 hour and 43 minutes and reach the fifth Hologic WTA Tour final of her career.
Siniakova then battled through two lengthy sets to defeat Leylah Fernandez 7-5, 6-4, reversing the result of last week's Hong Kong final and ending the Canadian's eight-match winning streak.
Sunday will mark the first all-Czech final in over two years, since Barbora Krejcikova took the title over Tereza Martincova in the Czech capital of Prague in July of 2021.
Head to Head
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Bouzkova advances to her first final since Prague 2022, in which she defeated Anastasia Potapova to lift her maiden trophy. All five of her tour-level finals to date have been on hard courts at WTA 250 level.
Shnaider, 19, was bidding for her second final in the past month, having been runner-up in Ningbo to Ons Jabeur. The World No.72 raced out of the blocks, striking clean winners on seven of the first eight points and powering to a 4-1 lead.
But at that point, errors started to cascade from the Shnaider racquet as she dropped the next four games in a row. She briefly found her opening form to prevent Bouzkova from serving the set out at 5-4, but could not sustain it through the ensuing tiebreak. The rock-solid Czech captured the set despite hitting no winners to Shnaider's 19 -- but only committing five unforced errors to the teenager's 25.
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After an off-court medical timeout, Shnaider resumed play in the second set with her left thigh strapped. But Bouzkova tightened her grip on the match, denying Shnaider's attempts to rush the net with pinpoint passes. Despite a last stand in which Shnaider found two of her finest winners to break Bouzkova as she served for the match, the World No.29 closed out the win with a break to love, sealed with a clean return winner.
"I was down pretty much the whole time in the first set and she was just hitting winners everywhere," said Bouzkova afterwards. "So I just tried to stick to my game and be solid, and somehow I turned it around."
Siniakova, meanwhile, is into her second final in two weeks, and her tenth career singles final overall. This season, Siniakova has already won the title on grass in Bad Homburg before her runner-up finish to Fernandez in Hong Kong last week.
Fernandez led Siniakova 2-0 in their head-to-head coming into the match, and the 2021 US Open finalist gave Siniakova another stern test on Saturday before her career-best eight-match winning streak came to an end with the loss.
"I think it was a really tough battle," Siniakova said after her victory. "Last week [in Hong Kong] it was totally different conditions, and I think here it was a little bit slower, so it suits me more because she plays really fast and not stepping back. So I’m really excited I won."
Siniakova let a 4-1, double-break lead slip in the opening frame before she regrouped to eke out the one-set lead in just under an hour. Seven of the 12 games in the topsy-turvy first set went to the returner.
An even longer second set went back and forth before Siniakova took charge for good in the 3-3 game. There, the Czech cracked a crosscourt backhand winner to reach break point, which she converted by taking control of the following rally with an error-forcing forehand.
