A Grand Slam final for Pegula?

Rybakina is being billed as the big boss of the tournament, but careful: Jess is not here to make up the numbers, she’s on a commando mission. She has this fascinating “dead calm” that keeps her from ever panicking. Against Keys or Anisimova, she proved that the harder you go at her, the more she enjoys it: she neutralizes your biggest shots and turns them into poisonous trajectories that pin you to your baseline. In fact, she never suffers from the opponent’s weight of shot, she feeds off it to punish you with metronomic precision. The defining image of this tournament is still Anisimova’s distress in the previous round, screaming at her box that she had no answers against the American’s total tennis.

For Jess, this tournament has a special flavor. At 31, she’s still chasing her first Grand Slam title, and you can feel it’s the ultimate goal of her season. She recently mentioned ending her career within three years, and now she plays with the serenity of someone who has no time left to waste. She’s no longer the player who “stalls” in the quarters; she’s a contender who fully embraces her status.

Elena, for her part, comes in with the label of favorite, but with an engine that can sputter at the start. If her serve coughs like it did in the first set against Swiatek (only 53.3% first serves in for the tournament), she’s going to hit a wall. Rybakina knows that in the electric atmosphere of a semi-final, her experience as a finalist here in 2023 carries real weight, but she has an invisible asset: Stefano Vukov. Despite all the outside noise, his presence in her camp is what allows Lena to transcend herself. There’s this tense, wired connection between them that pushes her to go for impossible spots when her back is against the wall. It’s this kind of “controlled chaos” that makes her such an exceptional player.

The match-up will come down to Lena’s ability to stabilize her first serve. Pegula has posted an impressive Dominance Ratio at this tournament, a sign that she’s controlling the overall tempo more than Rybakina’s previous opponents. Above all, how they handle the end of each set will be the real decider: where Elena can sometimes show signs of impatience if the serve isn’t there, Jess has this icy impassiveness. She’s also winning more pressure points on return than Lena over these two weeks (47.5% versus 42.7%), a stat that doesn’t lie about her ability to stay clear-headed when the tension rises. Iga made a lot of big, sloppy unforced errors, something I haven’t seen from the American.