Murray and Soares, the Australian Open champs, scored a 7-5, 4-6, 6-3 victory over the top-seeded team of Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut, who won Wimbledon this year after taking their first Grand Slam title last year at Flushing Meadows.
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Angelique Kerber won her first US Open title after beating Karolina Pliskova in three sets in NY.
Karolina Pliskova claimed it was harder to beat Venus Williams than it was to stun Serena Williams to make the US Open final on Thursday.
As a result of the defeat, Williams will lose her standing as world number one after 186 consecutive weeks at the top of the WTA rankings. “I know what to change”, Kerber said. But she did say that a left-knee injury that cropped up the night before made a difference.
Karolina Pliskova has a rare opportunity: the ability to unseat two world No. 1 players in the same tournament.
The 10th-seeded Pliskova began her on-court interview by blurting out that she couldn’t believe she’d eliminated Williams to earn a spot in her first major final.
‘I just blame that on thinking about my leg and just not thinking about the shot’. “But it was what it was”.
While Williams had problems, Pliskova was on top of her game. “She deserved to win”.
She also denied that the quarter-final match the day before, when she won against Simona Halep, left her exhausted for Thursday’s match.
Speaking at a press conference after the game, Williams congratulated Pliskova for her brilliant performance, but also said a left knee injury had affected her game. “It doesn’t happen often that you’re in the final of Grand Slams”.
“So it was not so easy mentally, but I was trying to, again, not put too much pressure on myself”.
She may be in unfamiliar ground in the second week of a Grand Slam, but in Kerber she’ll face a well-known foe.
‘Like I was making errors that I never make, and definitely I didn’t make in this tournament in particular.
Kerber, who reached the finals at the Rio Olympics as well, leads Pliskova 4-3 in head-to-head matchups, but was blown off the court in their most recent duel, losing last month’s Cincinnati final 6-3, 6-1. So I will be ready for anything.
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Williams had arrived in NY with doubts about her physical condition after a shoulder injury forced her to withdraw from her previous tournament, but revealed after this defeat that she had also been dealing with “serious left knee problems”, having suffered an injury in a previous match here.
