Safina impossibly comes through again

PARIS -- Wednesday was Groundhog Day for Dinara Safina. For the second consecutive match, the excitable 22-year-old executed a breathtaking escape against a fellow Russian.

In the fourth round, Safina dropped the first set to top-seeded Maria Sharapova, then trailed 2-5 in the second. After overcoming a match point and another 2-5 deficit in the tiebreaker, she rolled in the third set to reach the quarterfinals. On Wednesday, Elena Dementieva played the role of Sharapova and again, impossibly, Safina came through.

Really, this is starting to get ridiculous.

"Once you went through this, you always believe," Safina said. "Why not the second time?"

Dementieva had a match point, but her nerve and serve left her and Safina prevailed 4-6, 7-6 (5), 6-0. Safina, through to the first Grand Slam semifinal of her career, will meet another Russian, Svetlana Kuznetsova on Thursday.

Kuznetsova defeated Kaia Kanepi (pronounced KEYE-ah Ka-NEP-i) 7-5, 6-2 in the other quarterfinal.

Meanwhile, in the bottom half of the draw, the Serbs will have their own private play-in to the championship round. It's No. 2 Ana Ivanovic versus No. 3 Jelena Jankovic, and the winner will find herself one victory from her first Grand Slam singles title -- and the No. 1 world ranking.

The light-bulb moment for Safina came when she was trailing Dementieva 4-5 in the second set. She was ruining herself with errors, going for too much, so she decided to ratchet things down a bit. Voila! Patience on clay is the greatest of virtues.

"I think she was confused because I wasn't [hitting any harder]," Safina said in an interview with French television. "I said, 'You're going to have to hit a winner now.'"

Safina, who saved a match point against Dementieva (Dementieva hit a backhand into the net, leading 5-3 on Safina's serve) just as she did against Sharapova, never trailed in this tiebreaker, but faded slightly after winning the first three points. At 3-all, she ran off three straight points and you could see and feel Dementieva's grief hanging heavily in the air over Court Suzanne Lenglen.

The third set? Don't ask. It was a total meltdown. Dementieva won a total of 14 points.

"It was very hard to play the third set after I had so many chances to finish the match," Dementieva said. "I was trying to get myself back into the game, but it was kind of difficult."

Kanepi and Kuznetsova have a history. For starters, they are both 22 years old, with Kanepi the older by 17 days. In the 2001 junior tournament here at Roland Garros, Kanepi actually beat Kuznetsova -- and Safina -- on her way to the title.

That was eight years ago. Kuznetsova has won nine tournaments (one of them the 2004 U.S. Open) and nearly $9 million, while the best Kanepi has done is reach the final in Hassfelt, Belgium, and accumulate only $525,000 in career winnings.

Briefly, it seemed that Kanepi might give Kuznetsova a go. She was up a break in the first set, 4-2, but eventually her big groundstrokes started getting loose. Kuznetsova, a pro's pro, turned up the juice and broke Kanepi in the seventh and 11th games. That was it for the Estonian, who had her best Grand Slam tournament ever.

Like the two Serbs, Kuznetsova's reward for winning at Roland Garros would include the No. 1 ranking.

"Definitely, it would be nice," Kuznetsova said. "But also to win Grand Slam for me, to win French Open is also big. But I still don't see so far ahead, because my next match [is] going to be so tight."

She'll be the favorite against Safina -- but so was Sharapova.

"Dinara is playing very well on the clay court," Kuznetsova said. "She won in Berlin, she won two matches here with match balls down. She has too many lives, so I have to be careful with her."

source :http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/notebook?page=notebook/tennis06042008
by Greg Garber