Pegula or Muchova? | Sabalenka or Navarro? | US Open 2024 | Semi Final Preview & Predictions

Intro Jess Pula makes it to her first Grand Slam semifinal at the US Open she'll be facing Carolina Muka and on the other side we've got the other American Emma Navaro she's up against [Music] sabalenka well well well where do we Pegula def. Swiatek begin today I guess I've got to start by saying my predictions for this US Open particularly the set and week have not been very good I put my hands up I've called a lot of them wrong and off the bat I just want to say uh I think I was extremely harsh on Jessica Jessica Puli yesterday her statistics sort of the last few years are probably better than what I thought I think I was putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that she's never reached this Grand Slam semifinal and that's where usually she suffers and struggles to perform um but she managed to beat the world number one eager 62 64 straight sets and eager I think gave her a lot of opportunities and played a very ugly match but Pula was there and she's beaten eager now on several occasions recently yeah I thought it was a very very impressive performance from Jess Pula she showed that she's really growing as a player and she took the game to eager that was the difference eager can only play a game when the ball was in the middle of the Court the ball was never in the middle of the Court it was always at the Baseline very hard hitting from Jess Pula and you can tell eag's always out of sorts when she's playing on Fast courts and she can't get inside the tennis court and that's exactly what Jess Pula did I thought the first set was brilliant that's just the start she wanted she went to a four love lead and it looked like come on just keep it going Jess if you can keep the momentum then we won't have any troubles the second set little bit of a wobble in there uh she was up a break got broken back you thought oh no is this going to be all falling apart now but credit to her she actually embraced the crowd and used them to get over the line and I thought it was a very very solid performance and to do it in straight sets against the world number one even more impressive she's turned the corner now has Jess Pula and she had to thank the crowd and she was like finally I've made it to a semifinal we can stop talking about it and now it looks like just Andre rublev on the men's side is the one who's left only in the quarters now yeah but looking at some statistics we've got to be honest um the reason in which Jessica Pula won the match comfortably was because of eager's unforced errors and V sums it up nicely 41 out of 65 of the points Jessica Pula won so that's 63% of the points what unforced arrows from eager um certainly was was helped out quite a bit do you have that tweet yeah just popping it up there we go you can see because Juan ignasio was asking how could be so easy to beat the world number one and I think that did play a big factor yeah there was a lot going into the net uh from eager but I feel like these were forced to some degree as well the the unforced error count is I don't know how much to believe it on matches cuz when the ball's flying so fast you expect most players to be able to just get it back into play all the time but I think cuz eager doesn't drop back uh and try to like hit from further back in the court it's always flying right at her feet and she has to hit it a little bit earlier and yeah she doesn't adjust in time and well you saw there 41 quite a lot I thought that still you can't take this away from Jess Pula I'm not going to put this down to a bad eager performance I'm going to put this down to Jess poua stepping up to the mark on the big occasion in front of her home crowd there was something in the air and it's like when you get one of those moments in time like in America where all of the Americans are playing well everyone's going through there's a great energy in the whole place I felt it was just set in stone that Jess Pula had to win that match last night so that's the way I see it I don't think eager could have done anything about it yeah one thing which Maybe both of us are guilty of and that is with Jessica Pula is her performances against the top players we often dismiss her chances in a lot of big matches um a lot of that being to do with the round she's playing however a one-on-one situation against these elite players and what I mean by it's IGA sabalenka reaka and Coco go she's actually pretty good so her head-to-head against ego is four and six against sabalenka it's two and five reaka she's leading 3-1 and Goth she's leading 4-1 which may surprise some people that gives an overall of 13 all uh the the Tweet by the way is Van Ben again no worries I was just brought this other one up I thought you were talking about this no and she hits the ball as cleanly and as hard off the ground as anyone she's improved her serve and the explosive movement from the from her forehand Corner was Sublime to today it's not a bad record and when you look at since 2023 she's actually got a leading head-to-head against eager three wins with two losses and I can't really think of many players on tour who have that no most definitely she definitely has one of those good records uh against I think that this is going to improve as well that record she's one of the only players who can sort of get inside the head of eager I think on a tennis court which not many other players can do I saw some other statistics going around as well about eager and she doesn't seem to be performing much at the other slams other than rol on garos I mean you look at the likes of sabalenka she seems to be able to make the semis of all of the slams whereas eager is she becoming a bit of a one-trick pony and uh only really good at rol on garos or she's won US Open before but it still wasn't convincing when she did it it was a little bit like she has to struggle way through the tournament a little bit to be able to do it she's got the ability but the other players I feel are much more solid on a hardcore she still gained points at this US Open she's got over 10,000 points in the rankings no one's going to catch her at world number one so I don't think she's doing too bad brilant and we can't be too critical of her 23 years old she is definitely the best at rol on garos but still can go consistently deep in a lot of events I think um it was just a bad day in the office against pigula yeah definitely it was and pigula with wins against world number one you can see here defeated eager obviously at this year's Us open sabalenka at the WTA finals eager at Montreal uh United Cup against eager and before 2023 it was Zero wins four losses and since 2023 four wins one loss so she's definitely stepping up in the big matches I absolutely think that this is to silence People Like Us that keep on giving her a hard time and I'm happy that we don't have to give her as much of a hard time we don't want to give players a hard time as hard as it is to believe I know there's a lot of people out there watching going oh look at you are just like sending hate out into the world no we believe that she's that good and we just get so disappointed similar to rublev another player so good of points on the big stage well Jess pula's stepped up now and we can stop saying that she can't make a semi-final and she's going to be up against in the semi-final none other than karolina mova Muchova def. Haddad Maia the big Resurgence on the tour she knocked out your girl had admire with ease 6164 and this is going to be even tougher I think than eion for Jess Pula Muka somebody who does go deep in Grand Slams despite not being uh the fittest person on the tour it would see but you can see here from this graphic she was just recovering from this wrist injury and then she comes back on tour and goes deep in slams again it's just a bit insane yeah it's in between because she got to the semis at the US Open last year then had R sergery and now it's got to the semi-final again and if we just go back to this match um I can give some indepth analysis to what happened because I watched the full match and it was more than what the score line suggest did I've never seen a match like it it was the crazy it was the weirdest match of the US Open today uh there was a period in the second set so the first set was one-sided easy beat down mova demolishing had admire second set was nothing of the sorts and in fact mover was having to hit big Winners and stuff because she wasn't feeling physically fit there was a there was a a clear problem with her her movement was compromised and she was indicating to the trainer that she was going to need a medical timeout she managed to somehow go up a break in that second set she went up the break and things were not quite going quite well and we were still looking at it on the commentary team were thinking if this does go to threee she's going to lose um physically really struggling all of a sudden had admire towards the back of the core started breaking down and she then called a medical timeout when you'd think it would have been mova so you had a situation where both players were visibly upset mov staying on the coure and had admire breathing problems looked like she was having a panic attack uh completely went into her own and was suffering badly I'll see if I can send you a tweet about some details um but I I saw a picture of it but yeah that was all I didn't really get to catch much of this match I caught more of obviously eager Pula but yeah she did look in distress from what I could see and yeah going over to her box I saw like did look like she was struggling with something but unsure what yeah well I think it could have just been the emotions of what's Happening off the court so I'll send you the story now and after her last match be revealed that a physio didn't travel to New York with her because his wife was about to give birth one of the babies survived the other did not uh she was extremely close to her team and treats them like family she said she was going to try her best to win for him and make him proud she didn't get the win today but she battled to the end in the midst of Unthinkable tragedy her and her team have a lot to be proud of I hope they find the strength they need to get through this heart heartbreak that's a tweet which uh the tennis letter put out and it sort of sums up what's going on so my feeling is because of these incidents off the court which is very tragic she was probably in the moment willing herself to win so much it wasn't going her way and I think the emotions got the better of her I don't think the comment was saying it might have been sickness or panic attack and I think it could have been maybe some kind of panicky emotions cuz breathing was bad but a lot of it was probably caused with her trying to will herself to win so much and it wasn't going her way she then did resettle herself and played a little bit better but Muk at that stage didn't look like she had too much of an injury and that's why I say it was such a strange match to watch and I can't remember seeing one at the US Open like it where I didn't know what was going to happen there was one moment where the whole commentary team and everyone was was convinced that haded M was going to win because we thought M was going to just withdraw and pull out so if you look at these what I'm saying so that's why it's good to watch the matches guys and apologies for not watching the dimitro one I think we can both put our hands up yesterday yesterday's episode we didn't watch that match we tried commented on things in the match we didn't watch and we've learned from that and we're not going to do that again for sure this one I did watch it all and without seeing that in information then you'd like you saying you think she's going to do really well I'm not so sure and I really do fancy uh pigula based off that but you never know it might be all okay yeah I'm I'm impressed even more now with her mental strength to overcome adversity if anything Muka if anybody has had to come back from a very serious injury we've seen how it affected Dominic team's career coming back from rist injuries and me personally came back from one earlier this year as well I can't say I came back to any sort of level but uh yeah it is a very debilitating one and it takes a long time to recover months of recovery from something like that hopefully had admire is okay she goes back home and uh yeah just emotionally she can now sort of grieve with her her friends and stuff it's just that's very sad to hear that someone's having to deal with that and it's Spilled Out onto the tennis court as well so best wishes we don't know if that is exactly why that's me speculating I think that's what it could have been if that's happened then just all you can do is send best wishes to her and her team and her Physio and the physio family all of that it's terrible news I mean it just puts everything into perspective like tennis is means nothing really went in the whole long and short of things but let's move on to the other SE well the other semi-final is obviously going to be another American it is Emma Navaro versus Sabal Lena we spoke about their matches already going through and uh they've played each other twice Predictions uh before it is 1-1 in the head-to-head which is that makes it more interesting I think I know you don't look into head-to-heads quite as much but sabalenka won the last match they played twice this year and that was at Roland gas the only hardcore match Was Won by Emma Navaro and that was at Indian WS so another American win there on American soil yeah but nothing at a semifinal of a Grand Slam at the US Open I wouldn't read into the head-to-head at all I think this match is going to be played in the moment we know the crowd are going to be against sabalenka that can cause a bit of unrest last year there was against her she lost she needs them on her side she's not going to get it can she still overcome it with her big shots let's see she can't afford to be crumbling mentally and taking Pace off the ball she needs to play her game and her game is good enough to be Emma Navaro yeah are we going to see the best game and that's that's that's where the prediction is going to come in so let's go maybe we do a prediction because we spoke about this match yesterday um I think sabalenka is going to win the match I think it's going to be three sets I think she's going to drop a set Navaro is going to get one the crowd are going to be up for it but sabba is going to steady the ship and hit big and win comfortably in a third set yeah I mean I feel like it has three sets written all over at this one for some reason there I I just don't think it's going to be as straightforward as the Kim win Jang one the crowd are going to play a factor and even though she's buying them all uh what is it a honey juice I don't think that's going to prevent them from cheering for Emma Navaro there's there's just something in the air and I don't know what it is but there's part of me feeling like we could see an all American final I don't know what it is but things seem to be lining up a little bit I think I'm going to go for an upset I don't think I was going to pick it before but it's completely on a whim this that I think that sabalenka gets affected by the conditions of the crowd cheering so much for Navaro that she loses from a break up in the third set and falls apart and Emma Navaro goes on to win uh you could sort of could say a bit like the bza one I mean the crowd helping her pass bza and bza falling apart a bit and I think it might happen again here I'm going to go Navaro in three oh interesting so moving on to the other match pigula versus mova yes I think many people would have had it in their brackets despite pula's high ranking um don't think many people would have had Muk of but she was fantastic last year we know she's there's a player in there she is a top five player in my opinion when she's physically fit is she going to be physically fit for this match how's she going to be feeling it's all these big questions and with that I don't think I can put her through to into the final I think she's going to end up losing to Jessica Pula and Pula is going to make her first slam final uh for you that would be an all American one but I think we'll see sabalenka versus Pula at the US Open final and I'll have Pula winning in three sets yeah to take the first and then Pula to take the next two I think I don't know I think you've got in my head a little bit with this Muk talk as well with this whole injury because now I'm thinking even more towards Jess Pula now and I think Jess P for uh I was just trying to find just trying to find one while you were doing your thing but that's it yeah here we go I've got one no worries there we go we'll pop this forgot that's you tried hav forgot here we go we'll have this one I know I was trying but I was trying to listen to you as well I'm going to go for Pula in three in this one I think mukal will come out and you wi the first set like you said but I do think Pula will come back and with the help of the crowd she will make it on my books an all American final there we go you've heard it from game to love that is our predictions for the semi-final of the women's at the US Open we'll be doing one for the men's uh very soon as well the big news yanner beating Daniel Medford so stay tuned for that if you haven't already hit the like button subscribe if you're new and we'll see you later on for more Us open Action [Music]