Ons Jabeur won't make it past the quarterfinal stages at the 2023 Roland Garros, while Beatriz Haddad Maia is the happy player.
Both protagonists of the first WTA quarterfinal match of the day on the Court Philippe-Chatrier never made it past the quarterfinals as the Roland Garros and they had a clear goal coming into the match. After Aryna Sabalenka and Karolina Muchova secured their spots on Tuesday, there were only two more left, and Jabeur and Haddad Maia fought for one of them.
It is a semifinal spot that guarantees a match against a player seeded higher than the two as the other quarterfinal match will see the first-seeded Iga Swiatek clash with the sixth-seeded Coco Gauff in last year's final rematch.
But early in the morning, the second meeting on the WTA Tour between Jabeur and Haddad Maia was more important. The two met in Stuttgart only a few weeks ago, and back then it was the Tunisian who triumphed and wanted to do the same also on Wednesday in Paris.
With the semifinals on her mind and Roland Garros' dream ahead, Jabeur started aggressively as she usually does. The first set was full of break points and converting them was a key to success that the Tunisian found more often than her opponent.
Breaking the Brazilian's serve three times, while keeping the number of her own broken serves to two, the seventh seed won the first set 6-3 and looked to continue her successful journey at the 2023 Roland Garros.
But Haddad Maia refused to go down without a fight. The Brazilian faced two break points in the eleventh game of the second set, which were also small match points for her opponent, who lost only three points on her serve until that point.
But even serving masterclass didn't help Jabeur to win the second set. She won 21 of 22 points after her first serve, but that wasn't enough to overpower the Brazilian in the tie-break, as that's where the only lost point came for Jabeur. Haddad Maia won it 7-5 to force a decider.
During the third set, the fourteenth seed became the player that played the most minutes at a single tournament this season, with the number surpassing 12 hours and 42 minutes, but there was not fatigue visible on her play.
Haddad Maia kept on pushing and she was finding the lines also in the third set. After two hours and 31 minutes, she won the match 3-6, 7-6(5), 6-1 to book her first Grand Slam semifinal.
But the major semifinal isn't the only milestone for the Brazilian. Unless Muchova wins the Roland Garros and she loses in the semifinals, the Brazilian will enter the Top 10 for the first time in her career after the tournament.
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