Jessica Pegula outlasts Emma Navarro to reach US Open semifinals

Jessica Pegula had never lost to Emma Navarro before the two Americans met in Arthur Ashe Stadium Tuesday night.

She wasn’t going to start in a U.S. Open quarterfinal.

Pegula, the highest-seeded American in the draw, is on to the semis for the third straight year, coming back after dropping the first set to knock out Emma Navarro 3-6, 6-4, 6-3.

She’ll face world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka on Thursday with a chance to make the final here in Flushing for the second time in three years.

“It was really tough. It was physical, it’s humid,” Pegula said in an on-court interview afterward. “I wasn’t serving my best and I was fighting a lot of demons out there today.”

Having opened the door back up for Pegula in the second set, Navarro wasted little time in the decisive third.

She broke Pegula for the fourth time on the night to take a 2-1 lead, showing no cracks in her nerves at all.

Pegula, though, not only answered back. She never looked back.

She broke Navarro back and then broke her a second time to open a 4-2 lead on serve. That felt decisive in the moment, and it was.

Since she dropped the first set against Leylah Fernandez in the third round as well, it wasn’t Pegula’s first scare of the tournament. But by the end, that’s all it felt like.

The nascent underdog energy Navarro had carried early on dissipated. Pegula was now controlling points, controlling her serve and forcing errors from Navarro.

Fittingly in a match where every game seemed to extend, it took Pegula a second match point to close it out, but close it out she did.

“Every time I come out I have to tell the negative me to shut up and compete out there. Try to problem-solve as best I can,” Pegula said. “That’s all I’m trying to do really.”

Though she’s struggled in the late stages of tournaments this year, accounting for the slide in her ranking that was 11th overall a year ago, Navarro had a 3-1 record against top-10 opponents coming in.

The disparity in the rankings between these two belied what was always going to be a tight match, and which proved to be so.

The women’s draw has been surprisingly chalky this year — all of the top four seeds are still in, with Elena Rybakina and Coco Gauff set to play their quarterfinal matches Wednesday — but Pegula was on the ropes early.

Navarro broke her twice in the first set, and Pegula struggled to land her first serve early on. Both times she was broken in the first, it came partially because she missed her second serve, too.

While the games themselves were uniformly tight, Navarro took a commanding 6-3 first set as a result, and control of the match with it.

With both players content to play from the baseline, the match developed into one that featured consistently long rallies and consistently longer games.

Navarro was far from perfect on serve, too, twice broken in a second set Pegula took 6-4.

Those games — the second of which was for the set itself — were perhaps the decisive points of the match. In hindsight, they represented Navarro’s best chance at closing the thing out.