Update 4:05 pm. Veteran Italian Francesca Schiavone has rallied from a set and two match points down to edge Serbian Jelena Jankovic in a near three-hour marathon women’s singles quarterfinal.
The 31-year-old former French Open champion produced a typically gutsy come-from-behind effort, posting a 5-7 7-6(2) 6-3 victory in front of a packed Pat Rafter Arena.
The third seed did it the hard way, fighting back from 0-3 in the first, 3-5 in the second and 1-3 in the third set, taking the last five games of the match from an increasingly despondent Jankovic.
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“I shouldn’t go there, down 3-0, 5-3 and 3-1 – I’m p—ed with this, it’s true. I could finish faster. I will try to not do it again,” Schiavone said before outlining her recovery plan ahead of tomorrow’s semifinal.
“Massage for sure and then I should eat … (in Italian: “how do you say?”) … a cow.”
In a match where both players went through phases of claiming a run of games, two of the best movers on tour battled out an epic point at 5-5 in the first with Schiavone falling to her back in jubilation after making a backhand pass down the line.
It was not enough to rattle Jankovic, a crosscourt backhand forcing Schiavone into error to bring up set point with the Italian double-faulting to drop the first set, 7-5.
After breaking to love and finding herself at 4-1 in the second, Jankovic looked well on her way to booking a first semifinal berth in Brisbane.
“I play the first set and it’s 7-5 to her but I have much, much more, but then my energy went a little bit down because you lose a set and you say ‘I can play much, much better’,” Schiavone said.
Fighting to stay in the match at 3-5 down though, Schiavone conjured the resolve she so often finds when on the brink of defeat, breaking serve before putting away a confident serve-volley winner for 5-5.
Serving to stay in the match at 5-6 and facing a pair of match points, Schiavone backed her serve to force a tiebreak, which she clinched 7-2.
After letting the match slip in the second, Jankovic seemed to have bucked Schiavone’s momentum picking up a 3-1 lead in the decider, but again the ascendancy would shift.
A sixth foot fault from Schiavone would not be enough to stop the juggernaut, with a brilliant stop volley winner bringing up her first match point.
She clinched it on her third and will play the winner of this afternoon’s quarterfinal between German No.2 seed Andrea Petkovic and unseeded Estonian Kaia Kanepi for a place in the Brisbane final.
“Both physically, they are strong, 10 times stronger than me,” she said.
“I hope they go three hours and a half.”
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