MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Madison Keys saved a match point and came back to upset No. 2 Iga Swiatek 5-7, 6-1, 7-6 (10-8) in a high-intensity, high-quality Australian Open semifinal on Thursday night to reach a Grand Slam title match for the second time in her career.
Keys is a 29-year-old American who was the runner-up at the 2017 U.S. Open. She claimed more games against Swiatek than the five-time major champion had dropped in her five previous matches at Melbourne Park combined over the past two weeks.
But Keys was on the brink of defeat when Swiatek served for the match at 6-5 in the third set and was a point away from ending it at 40-30. Swiatek put a backhand into the net there, and eventually got broken by double-faulting, sending the match to a concluding first-to-10, win-by-two tiebreaker.
The 19th-seeded Keys will face No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in Saturday’s final. Sabalenka beat good friend Paula Badosa 6-4, 6-2 in the semifinals.
Sabalenka, a 26-year-old from Belarus, won the Australian Open the past two years and can become the first woman since 1999 to complete a threepeat.
"If she plays like this,” Badosa said about Sabalenka, “I mean, we can already give her the trophy.”
The key statistic: Sabalenka finished with a 32-11 advantage in winners.
That’s the sort of excellence that helped Sabalenka win her first major trophy at Melbourne Park in 2023, and she since has added two more — in Australia a year ago and at the U.S. Open last September.
The last woman to reach three finals in a row at the year’s first Grand Slam tournament was Serena Williams, who won two from 2015-17. Martina Hingis was the most recent woman with a threepeat, doing it from 1997-1999.
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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
Howard Fendrich, The Associated Press
