Jessica Pegula outlasts Emma Navarro to reach US Open semifinals

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

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

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

She’ll face world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka on Thursday with a chance to make her second U.S. Open final.

“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 broke Pegula for the fourth time on the night to take a 2-1 lead in the third, 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.

Having dropped the first set against Laylah Fernandez in the third round as well, it wasn’t Pegula’s first scare of the tournament. But by the end, a scare was all it felt like.

The nascent underdog energy Navarro had carried early on dissipated. Pegula controlled points, controlled her serve and forced errors from Navarro — a 180 from how things had looked earlier on.

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.

“I think there was a minute there where I felt like I kind of had her number,” Navarro said. “Then she probably felt the same about me for a little while, and probably at the right times.”