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Well, where do we start? Serena Williams’ bid to emulate Steffi Graf’s 1988 feat of sweeping the Grand Slams in one calendar year has been destroyed in spectacular fashion.
Roberta Vinci and Flavia Pennetta have instead set up the most unlikeliest of Grand Slam finals showdowns in recent tennis history.
Vinci and Pennetta, doubles specialists for most of their professional careers, will square off in the first ever all-Italian Grand Slam singles final after both players pulled off stunning upsets over the world’s top two ranked women in contrasting circumstances.
We’ll get to Vinci’s stunning win over Serena Williams shortly, but first to Pennetta, who somewhat surprisingly maintained her head-to-head dominance against Romanian second seed Simona Halep with a straightforward straight sets victory.
Pennetta won 6-1, 6-3 in just an hour to progress to her maiden Grand Slam singles final, having previously featured in three Grand Slam doubles finals, winning the 2011 Australian Open title with Gisela Dulko.
The Brindsi native had also defeated former Grand Slam champions Petra Kvitova and Samantha Stosur in earlier rounds, as she seized on a draw that opened up following the shock second round exit of fourth seed Caroline Wozniacki.
But as they say, you can only defeat who’s ahead of you. The Italian instead faced Petra Cetkovska in the third round before defeating those two aforementioned former Major champions, Stosur and Kvitova, in the round of 16 and quarter-finals respectively.
33-year-old Pennetta will face off for the title against 32-year-old Vinci, who has achieved the Career Grand Slam in doubles alongside another compatriot in Sara Errani.
They will become the third and fourth players from Italy to contest a Grand Slam final, after Francesca Schiavone, who won the 2010 French Open, and Errani, who lost to Maria Sharapova at the same tournament.
Vinci shattered Williams’ bid for history by coming from a set down to upset the American, thus sentencing the world number one to her first Grand Slam semi-final defeat since her infamous threat to “shove a ball down a line judge’s throat” saw her defaulted from a match against Kim Clijsters at the US Open in 2009.
Williams had won the previous four Grand Slam titles to achieve the second “Serena Slam” of her career. But Vinci destroyed the script in devastating fashion, winning 2-6, 6-4, 6-4.
This was her first win over an opponent ranked higher than 40th in the tournament, her win over 25th seed Eugenie Bouchard in the round of 16 not counting as the Canadian had withdrawn due to a head injury.
She had also never been past the second round of a Major this year.
Twelve months after the unlikeliest of men’s finals was contested between Kei Nishikori and Marin Cilic when it was expected Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer would contest it, we now have an unlikely women’s final.
As for Williams, while her bid for Grand Slam history has been shattered at her national championships, there’s always next year. And with 2016 being an Olympic year, she will have the incentive to produce a very dominant 12 months.
She will more than likely start favourite at all four of the Majors next year and you can also bet on her successfully defending the Olympic gold medal at Rio in August.
That’s quite impressive for someone who will turn 35 next September (she turns 34 this month), has won 21 Grand Slam singles titles to date, and is still with a chance of catching Graf (22) and Margaret Court (24) in the near future.
Anyway, focus will now turn towards the final.
Pennetta leads the head-to-head against Vinci overall, with five wins to four, including their most recent meeting, at the US Open two years ago, which saw the elder of the Italians advance to her first Grand Slam semi-final.
She also defeated Vinci for the loss of just two games at Roland Garros in 2010.
Meanwhile, Djokovic will be expected to reach a sixth US Open final overall. At the time of writing he was leading defending champion Marin Cilic by two sets to love and is currently a break up in the third set.
If he ultimately wins through as expected, then he will face the winner of the all-Swiss semi-final showdown between Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka.
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