Rybakina saved two match points and returned to the Kazakh duel against Putintseva

Elena Rybakina, fourth seed, defeated her compatriot Yulia Putintseva for the first time in her careerwith two match points she didn’t know how to take advantage of, and reached the semifinals of the WTA 1000 in Madrid.

The Kazakh, Wimbledon champion in 2022 and this year a winner in Brisbane and Abu Dhabi to bring the number of awards in his career to seven, staged a brilliant comeback (4-6, 7-6(4) and 7-5) in two hours and 48 minutes which made him place in the top four of the Caja Mágica tournament for the first time.

This is the sixth semifinal of 2024 for Elena Rybakina who lost to Putintseva in Rome in 2020 and at Indian Wells in 2021, the two events where they coincided. The first duel between players from Kazakhstan in a quarterfinal of the WTA 1000 ended on the side of the fourth player in the world, 24 years old and born in Moscow.

A fourth consecutive victory for the winner, who won the Stuttgart tournament last week and is the player on the circuit with the most games won so far in 2024, thirty with it, came from a good reaction.

Putintseva had her first semi-final of the season in hand but escaped with the match won. He took the first set and was unable to close out the match in the second as he fell to his rival in the tiebreaker. In the third they again took the course of the duel and stood at 5-1. She had two match points at 5-2 but Rybakina did not give up and made a remarkable comeback in the match. They won six straight games and closed out the win 7-5 in the final.

Rybakina will face the winner of the clash between reigning champion, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, and Russian Mirra Andreeva in the semifinals.