Daria Kasatkina and
Danielle Collins will play for the Silicon Valley Classic trophy today after defeating their opponents in the semifinals.
Kasatkina was the first one to play in San Jose and the Russian took on Elise Mertens who played a great event until that. The expectations of a close match were not fulfilled as Kasatkina was dominant from start to finish. Mertens started off the match fairly well despite struggling on serve.
Those issues persisted throughout the first set which gave Kasatkina several chances to break her. Ultimately at 3-4, the Russian finally broke through taking a 5-3 lead before closing out the set with 6-3. Mertens continued to struggle on her serve in the 2nd set. It gave the Russian a lot of chances to break her and she did so, twice. Mertens faced 12 break points in total saving 10 of them. In the end, Kasatkina never faced one and she closed it off with 6-2.
Joining her in the final will be native Danielle Collins. The American recently won her maiden title on clay in Italy and she will now have a chance to add another one. She faced Ana Konjuh in the final and utterly dominated her from start to finish. Konjuh is known as a player whose level ranges from sensational to abysmal and today was more of the latter.
Collins was able to force her on the backfoot with the Croatian committing far too many mistakes to overcome it. Collins won the first set with 6-0 and the 2nd with 6-2. The key thing for Collins was her strong shotmaking on Konjuh's 2nd serve as the Croatian won only 1 of 17 2nd serve points.