Isner to meet Berdych in final showdown

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina: John Isner ousted top-seeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France 6-4, 3-6, 7-6 (7/3) Friday to stay on track to retain his Winston-Salem ATP title.
Isner, seeded third in the US Open tune-up event, will face second-seeded Czech Tomas Berdych in the final.
Berdych defeated seventh-seeded American Sam Querrey 6-4, 6-3 in the semifinals on Friday.
“I’m very, very happy to be back in the final,” said Isner, who prefers one more day of tournament action to an early arrival on the practice courts of Flushing Meadows, where the US Open begins on Monday. “I don’t like getting to Grand Slams early. If I’m playing the week before, I want to do as well as I can. I’m playing the final match, so I’m very satisfied with that. I’m looking to defend my title. I did it this year in Newport, so maybe I can pull it off again.” Isner broke Tsonga once to take the opening set and the Frenchman broke Isner once to win the second frame and level the match.
Serving at 5-6 in the deciding third set Tsonga saved two match points — the first with an ace up the middle — but finally couldn’t withstand the towering American, who belted 24 aces and wrapped up the victory in two hours and 13 minutes.
Berdych, who accepted a late wild card entry into the tournament, broke Querrey five times en route to victory in one hour and 39 minutes.
Querrey delivered 18 aces but also had five double faults.
“I don’t think I necessarily needed to break him five times, but on the other hand, I lost my serve a couple of times. I was trying to get my chances,” said Berdych, who is seeking a second title of 2012 after a victory in Montpellier.
In all the match featured eight breaks of serve. Berdych, ranked seventh in the world, had 18 break point chances against the big-serving American.
“It is unusual,” Berdych said. “I can play with someone that is not serving as well as Sam and some of the other guys, and I’m struggling to break them for two, three sets, maybe he has service with more slice, spin. But somehow you play with a player and you have a feeling and you know a little bit how to read his serve and it just makes it all of a sudden much more easier.” Querrey said his service mistakes were too costly.
“I played some decent return games,” Querrey said. “I broke him a few times. But on my service games, I was throwing in double faults, a couple of easy forehands, and just giving him too many easy breaks on my game points. That makes it tough. I just kind of gave it to him.” Berdych said said the outcome of the final will depend largely on how he handles Isner’s big serve.
“It’s definitely going to be the key to the match, the decider for sure,” Berdych said. “He’s playing at home, he wants to win as bad as me, so we’ll see. It should be a close match.”

Kvitova through to final
In New Haven, Connecticut: Second-seeded Petra Kvitova will face Maria Kirilenko in the New Haven Open final after four-time defending champion Caroline Wozniacki pulled out with a knee injury on Friday, ending her remarkable sequence of victories.
Czech Kvitova breezed past Italy’s Sara Errani 6-1, 6-3 while Kirilenko advanced when Wozniacki retired after losing the first set 7-5.
Kvitova, the 2011 Wimbledon champion, needed just 24 minutes to win the first set. She then broke Errani in the first game of the second set and cruised from there, closing out the match with another service break.
Wozniacki had won 20 straight matches at New Haven, but could not match Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Chris Evert as the only women to win a tour tournament five straight times.
“I could feel it from the start,” she said. “It just started to get a bit worse. I decided to stop because if you don’t feel a hundred percent, you can’t compete at a hundred percent. It’s better to let it rest. I wasn’t going to win this match anyway if I’m not on a hundred percent fit level.” The third-seeded Dane had swept all before her at New Haven since entering as a relatively unknown 18-year-old in 2008. She hadn’t dropped a set here since the 2010 final.
“You defend it again and again, all of a sudden you’re in this elite group that has won a tournament four times,” she said. “There’s a lot of players that never win a tournament and there’s a lot of players that never win four. Winning the same one four times in a row is definitely special.” That was part of the reason she decided to play Friday, despite the injury, which she suffered in the quarterfinal on Thursday against Dominika Cibulkova. She went on to win that match 6-2, 6-1 after getting the knee taped.
She said medical experts had told her she would not hurt the knee further by playing Friday.
She seemed to move well during the match, but had a hard time with Kirilenko’s serve and did not get single break point in the set.
Kirilenko broke Wozniacki in the 11th game and served out the set to avoid a tiebreaker.
“She was fighting,” Kirilenko said. “She was running. When I hit a great shot, she couldn’t run for it. She made the right decision. She has to take a rest before the US Open.” The 25-year-old Russian will be playing her first tour final in the United States.
“Every match I feel that I’m improving,” Kirilenko said. “I found the way to play again on hard court, as grass court is different completely than hard. Today I played the best tennis in this tournament.”

Vinci triumphs
In Dallas, Italy’s Roberta Vinci completed her warm-up for the US Open with a straight-sets victory over former world number one Jelena Jankovic in the final of the WTA’s Texas Open on Friday.
Vinci, seeded third, won the last six games of the second set to complete a 7-5, 6-3 victory.
Vinci, making the most of second-seeded Jankovic’s five double faults, claimed her seventh career WTA title and her first of 2012.
It was a morale-boosting victory with the US Open — the final Grand Slam of the season — due to start on Monday at Flushing Meadows.
Serbia’s Jankovic, meanwhile, missed an opportunity to lift a trophy for the first time since 2010.
It was her second appearance in a final this season. She lost to American Melanie Oudin on the grass courts of Birmingham in June.
Vinci, who had booked her spot in the final with a dominant 6-0, 6-0 semifinal win over Serbia’s Bojana Jovanovski on Thursday, found the going tougher against Jankovic, needing just over two hours to triumph.