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Mauresmo advances to Advanta finals ( 2003-11-02 11:19) (Agencies) Second-seeded Amelie Mauresmo survived 5-1 deficits in the second set and second-set tiebreaker Saturday to beat No. 5 Ai Sugiyama and advance to the Advanta Championships final.
"I kept fighting, but it was tough to still believe in victory," Mauresmo said after a 3-6, 7-6 (6), 7-5 victory that took 2 hours, 35 minutes.
On Sunday, will Mauresmo play the winner of the late match between Anastasia Myskina and Nadia Petrova.
The match appeared headed toward a quick and easy two-set win for the hard-hitting Sugiyama, who used her compact backhand to rattle Mauresmo, No. 7 in the WTA rankings. Sugiyama won the final four games of the first set and jumped to a 5-1 lead in the second.
Then Mauresmo, with her right thigh taped, began to rally.
Relying on her long forehand, she won five straight games. Sugiyama kept approaching the net, but Mauresmo stayed low and smacked passing shots for easy points. Perhaps the comeback took something out of her, because Sugiyama went ahead 5-1 in the tiebreaker.
Sugiyama, ranked 11th, then served for the match ahead 6-3. But Mauresmo came back and won the next five points to take the set.
"It's a big comeback. It was one of the best," Mauresmo said.
Mauresmo, who missed four months of the season with right knee cartilage inflammation, struggled with her serve all night. She got her first serve in only 58.6 percent of the time, though she had five aces to Sugiyama's one. Mauresmo — whose top serve reached 109 mph — was still in the low 100s in the third set, but she double-faulted 10 times.
Tied 5-5 and 30-30 in the third set, Sugiyama needed an injury timeout after she appeared to cramp. A trainer massaged Sugiyama's left upper thigh for nearly three minutes. When Sugiyama returned, she grimaced on a few rallies and didn't have anything left for Mauresmo.
Mauresmo won the final two games, and celebrated by jumping up and pumping her left fist. She said it was one of the most improbable victories of her career and thought several times she had lost the match.
"When you're there, you just play point after point," she said. "You don't see too far ahead."
Mauresmo advanced to her fifth finals appearance this season. She won the J&S Cup in May in Warsaw, Poland, when Venus Williams quit in the third set with a strained muscle.
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