Mboko to face Navarro in Strasbourg final with first clay title at stake
Either Victoria Mboko or Emma Navarro will leave the Internationaux de Strasbourg with a first career clay-court title at WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz level on Saturday after winning Friday's semifinals.
Strasbourg: Scores | Draws | Order of play
A resurgent Navarro, who last won back-to-back matches in January and recently returned to the tour after time away for health reasons, dominated an all-American matchup with Ann Li 6-1, 6-3 to reach her first showpiece match on tour in more than a year -- since winning in Mexico last March when she herself was a Top 10 player. Top seed Mboko then followed her into Saturday's tilt by outlasting Jaqueline Cristian 7-6(3), 3-6, 6-2 to advance to her third final of the season after runner-up efforts in both Adelaide and Doha.
The first-time meeting between Mboko and Navarro will also give the winner her third career WTA singles title, and a notable boost ahead of the year's second Grand Slam tournament at Roland Garros. Navarro is 2-0 in tour-level finals, both at WTA 500 level, while Mboko was a winner in Montreal and Hong Kong last year.
Mboko finding her feet on the terre battue
Mboko is not just competing in her first tour-level clay-court final in Strasbourg. Before this week, she had never played a quarterfinal or semifinal on the surface either. Being short on match play this spring -- she lost her opener in Madrid and withdrew from Rome with illness -- led to her taking a late wild card into Strasbourg.
It proved the right choice. Her 2 hour and 52-minute win over Cristian was an impressive match to win for anyone, but especially someone who's still comparatively new to clay-court tennis -- and needed a medical timeout midway through to boot.
The in-form Romanian, who just last week reached her career-high ranking of No. 28 and professes clay to be her favorite surface, led 5-2 in the first set and had three set points -- one each in the 5-2, 5-4 and 6-5 games. She also had all the momentum entering the final set, as she had two break points in Mboko's first service game of the decider.
She didn't convert either of them, and the World No. 10 broke serve in the game that immediately followed it to take a lead she never relinquished even despite playing the second half of the match with her right pectoral muscle taped.
Fourth time's the charm in Strasbourg for Navarro
Navarro has nearly doubled her season's total of wins this week in Strasbourg, and her win over Li was her most impressive.
She stormed out to a 6-1, 5-1 lead in under an hour before Li captured consecutive games. But the deficit -- made in large part to the fact that Li struck 41 unforced errors to just 20 winners in 1 hour and 17 minutes -- proved too large.
Navarro showed some of the rally tolerance that took her to a career-high ranking of World No. 8 to frustrate Li into misses, and said afterwards that she was "really happy" with her performance. She saved seven of eight break points faced.
"I'm excited," Navarro said after booking her place in the final in her fourth career trip to Strasbourg. "I had a lot of fun playing out here today."