PARIS (AP) — With the indifference of a 17-year-old spending her time in Paris, Mirra Andreeva says she and her coach put together a game plan before a tennis match — and then she forgot all about it, preferring to just wing it.
It seems to be going well so far: The unseeded Russian is the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist in more than a quarter century.
Playing in only her sixth major tournament, Andreeva defeated second seed Aryna Sabalenka 6-7 (5), 6-4, 6-4 in French Open on Wednesday. Next, on Thursday, Andreeva faces another surprise player: No. 12 Jasmine Paolini, a 28-year-old Italian who reached her first major semifinal by beating No. 4 Elena Rybakina 6-2, 4-6, 6-4.
“I always play the way I want. We had a plan with my coach for the match, but after, I forgot everything, and when I played the match, I didn’t have any thoughts in my head,” said world number 38 Andreeva, who lives in Cannes and Cannes. coached by 1994 Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez. “So maybe I would say that my strength is that I play the way I want and do whatever I want to do.”
Words that many parents of a teenager have probably heard at home.
The other games on Thursday are Number 1 Iga Swiatek against Number 3 Coco Gauff. Swiatek seeking fifth and fourth Grand Slam titles in Paris; Gauff won the US Open last September and was runner-up to Swiatek at Roland Garros in 2022. They both won their singles quarterfinals on Tuesday.
Gauff, with Katerina Siniakova, and Paolini, with Sara Errani, also advanced to the semifinals in doubles; Andreeva withdrew from the event before her quarterfinal scheduled for Wednesday.
Andreeva’s success at her age is not unprecedented. But that’s been quite a while.
She is the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist since Martina Hingis at the age of 16 in 1997. You have to go further back to find a younger player who knocked out the No. 1 ranked woman. 1 or 2 at Roland Garros: 1990, when Monica Seles — like Hingis, now a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame — was 16 when she beat Steffi Graf in the final.
“I could say that I was almost like a normal teenager, because I still had to do schoolwork that I didn’t like. I watch a lot of TV series in my free time. I watch Netflix. “I sometimes spend too much time on my Instagram,” Andreeva said. “But maybe what makes me a little different is, I don’t know if I can say that I’m an adult, but I feel like I’m a mature person, and I feel that I know what I’m doing.”
So even though he and Martinez had discussed strategies beforehand, these tactics were not necessarily implemented.
According to Andreeva, she thinks about things from one shot to another.
“I decided: ‘What do I do? Should I go down to the front of the line or should I cross? Should I do a drop shot. Should I lob?’” said Andreeva, whose 19-year-old sister, Erika, lost to Sabalenka in the first round last week. “It’s sometimes not very good, because I have a lot of decisions in my mind.”
He has yet to win any tour-level titles and is competing in only his fifth Slam tournament.
Sabalenka, meanwhile, is a two-time Australian Open champion, including in January, and had won the first 23 sets of the Grand Slam she played in 2024 until losing two in a row against Andreeva. While dealing with a stomach ailment, Sabalenka was visited several times by trainers and doctors and often had her midsection touched.
There were many shifts in momentum, and the outcome felt in doubt until the final game, when Andreeva broke with a beautiful lob that Sabalenka couldn’t even move to try to reach.
“If we look back,” Andreeva said later, “I wouldn’t have expected myself (in) the semifinals.”
Should Sabalenka and Rybakina win, it would be only the second time in the professional era, which began in 1968, that the women’s 1-4 seeds have advanced to the semifinals in Paris. The other occurred in 1992.
But Paolini and Andreeva prevented this.
With Jannik Sinner advancing to the men’s semi-finals, it was the first time that an Italian woman and an Italian man had both appeared in the last four of the same Grand Slam tournament in the same year. It’s a great moment for their country in tennis: On Monday, Sinner will become the first man to become No. 1 in the ATP rankings.
The men’s semifinals will be held on Friday, when Sinner will play Carlos Alcaraz, and Alexander Zverev will face Casper Ruud. Zverev reached the last four in Paris for the fourth year in a row, beating Alex de Minaur 6-4, 7-6 (5), 6-4 on the night.
Paolini was knocked out in the first or second round in each of his first 16 Grand Slam appearances before reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open. Now he had reached two steps further than that.
For Paolini, Thursday was a chance for a rematch against Andreeva, who is more than a decade younger but won their meeting last month at the Madrid Open on clay.
“He is very young but he is very good mentally. And he can defend very well. He can serve well,” said Paolini. “It will be a tough game, but we are in the semifinals, so there is no chance of an easy game.”
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