Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova advances to first Grand Slam final ever at Roland Garros

Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova is through to her first grand slam final ever by defeating Tamara Zidansek 7-5 6-3.

It has been a long time coming for Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and her first grand slam final but at the 2021 Roland Garros things finally clicked. Today she was better than Tamara Zidansek. It started off shaky for Pavlyuchenkov as she lost her serve in the first game.

It was not something unusual for her as she battled back several times in previous rounds but Zidansek was looking good early on going for those aggressive baseline winners. Soon however she started making mistakes and Nastia was not only able to pull the break back, but also add one on top of it.

She served for the set at 5-3 but Zidansek found timely winners to make 5-4 and then 5-5 but once again her erratic style of play gave Nastia a chance. At 6-5, she finally closed it out taking the opening set 7-5. Zidansek had 17 winners but also 19 unforced errors and that was simply too much.

The 2nd set was a very close one despite Nastia taking an early 3-1 lead. We saw three breaks in the first four games and Pavlyuchenkova emerged with a break up after that. At 4-2 however, she lost her serve giving Zidansek a chance to make it 4-4 but she could not.

Pavlyuchenkova broke her once more to back the lead and she closed it out with 6-3. Zidansek once again posted a negative winner to unforced error ratio and that was simply not good enough today.