NEW YORK – Emma Navarro made a stunning turnaround to reach her first Grand Slam semifinal, defeating Paula Badosa 6-2, 7-5 at the US Open on Tuesday, surprising defending champion Coco Gauff.
Trailing 1-5 in the second set and three points away from the decisive third set, Navarro won the next four points to stay in the match, starting a streak in which she scored 24 of the match’s final 28 points.
“I think things weren’t looking so good in the second set, but I just tried to be really tough, hang in there and make her hit one more ball,” Navarro said. “I felt like if I could get some longer points and maybe put some pressure on her, I could come back and maybe finish it in two sets.”
“Happy with how I accomplished this.”
Navarro, the 13th-seeded American who had never won a main draw match at her home major before this year, advanced to Thursday’s semifinals where she will face second-seeded Aryna Sabalenka or seventh-seeded Qinwen Zheng.
The 23-year-old Navarro, who knocked out third-seeded Gauff in the fourth round on Sunday, needed 29 minutes to win the first set before 26th-seeded Badosa took a 5-1 lead in the second set.
But when Navarro scored a break win against the Spaniard in the next game, the player, who leads the WTA Tour with 18 three-set wins, felt that she might not need a third game.
“I felt like even though she was leading 5-1, 5-2 after that game, she wasn’t completely convinced she could win the set,” Navarro said. “So I thought if I could push her back a little bit and make her think a little bit about her service game, maybe I could sneak back into the match.”
She did so, winning six matches in a row with some help from Badosa, who said she had been a “disaster” while dealing with the pressure of reaching her first Grand Slam semifinal.
“I never had the momentum in that game. I played pretty well for four or five games. It was 5-1, but I never felt like myself on the pitch,” Badosa said.
“I lost, I don’t know, almost 20 points in a row. That’s very strange for me because I’m a pretty consistent player, so I didn’t expect that.”
Navarro also defeated Gauff in the fourth round at Wimbledon before losing in the next round to eventual runner-up Jasmine Paolini, a 6-2, 6-1 victory in less than an hour.
But the 2021 NCAA singles champion from Virginia was ready for this duel between the New York natives. She prevailed against Badosa, winning the first three games and then capitalizing on the opportunity Badosa gave her late.
Navarro is the sixth player in the last 40 years to reach the semifinals of the US Open without first winning the tournament’s main draw, joining recent champions Bianca Andreescu in 2019 and Emma Raducanu in 2021.
It was a career year for Navarro: he reached at least the third round in all four Grand Slams after never making it past the second round in a major.
She is the third former college player in the last 40 years to make it to the semifinals at Flushing Meadows, joining Oklahoma State’s Lori McNeil in 1987 and UCLA’s Jennifer Brady in 2020.
Her victory capped an impressive summer season for Badosa, who entered Tuesday having won 24 of her last 30 matches since the tournament in Rome in May, with a WTA 500 title in Washington and a semifinal appearance in Cincinnati being the highlights before her run in New York.
ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
