No. 4 seed Jessica Pegula pulled off a comeback from 6-1, 3-1 down to maintain her perfect record against No. 2 seed Amanda Anisimova, advancing to the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships final 1-6, 6-4, 6-3 in 2 hours and 2 minutes.
Dubai: Scores | Draws | Order of play
Pegula now leads her head-to-head against Anisimova 5-0, backing up her wins in the 2020 Western & Southern Open second round, 2024 Charleston second round, 2024 Toronto final and last month’s Australian Open quarterfinals. Three of Pegula’s five wins have come in three sets.
The 31-year-old booked her spot in her 21st career final on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, and 10th at WTA 1000 level or above. She is a three-time WTA 1000 champion (Guadalajara 2022, Montreal 2023 and Toronto 2024), a four-time WTA 1000 runner-up (Madrid 2022, Cincinnati 2024, Miami 2025, Wuhan 2025), and was also a finalist at the 2023 WTA Finals Cancun and 2024 US Open.
Pegula will face either No. 3 seed Coco Gauff or No. 7 seed Elina Svitolina as she bids to lift the Dubai trophy for the first time. She leads her head-to-head against Gauff 5-3 (including 3-1 on outdoor hard courts) and against Svitolina 5-3 (including 5-2 on outdoor hard courts).
How did Pegula pull off the comeback?
Pegula can usually be relied upon for concise and accurate match analysis as soon as her on-court interviews. This time, even she seemed mystified.
“At the start of the third, it was 1-1,” she said. “I just looked at my coach and I was like, ‘I’m just happy I’m still even here right now.’ She was playing some incredible tennis, and I just came out a little slow. And when you come out slow against Amanda, she can really just wipe you off the court, which is what she was doing.
“I held on to my serve there in the second set. I just kept telling myself that. I had some break points in the first set, even though it was convincingly the other way, and I knew I could get some break points back. That’s really all I was focusing on.”
Indeed, there was no single, dramatic turning point. Pegula clawed her way back into the match gradually — it was the work of the whole set, game by game. To break it down further, here are the key moments:
- At 6-1, 2-0, Anisimova seemed at her most invincible when she lasered a backhand pass — arguably her best shot of the match — to hold break point for a 3-0 lead. But she failed to get her return into play, and on the next point netted a forehand sitter off a poor Pegula drop shot. Pegula escaped with the hold;
- Anisimova seemed to have avoided a turning point when she held for 3-1 from 0-40 down, striking clean winners on two of the three break points. But as Pegula alluded, it was indicative of her increasing ability to get a foothold in Anisimova’s service games;
- Pegula’s breakthrough came when Anisimova threw in another error-strewn service game at 3-2 up — but Anisimova redoubled her aggressive efforts in a three-deuce mini-tussle in the next game, finding a heavy backhand on her fourth break point to take a 4-3 lead.
Even though Pegula hadn’t fully turned the scoreboard in her favour at this point, her tactics were beginning to wrest the match away from Anisimova’s first-strike territory. Pegula was beginning to draw overhead errors with sky-high defensive lobs, and disrupt Anisimova’s timing with defensive slices. She levelled again at 4-4 — and this time, ran away with the momentum. From 4-3 down, Pegula won seven of the next eight games to go up 4-1 in the third set.
The end result was a turnaround in Anisimova’s fortunes — just 24 hours earlier, she had pulled off a comeback of her own, defeating Mirra Andreeva 2-5, 7-5, 7-6(4) from 6-2, 2-0 down.
How did Pegula explain her dominance in the head-to-head?
Pegula modestly claimed bafflement on this front, too.
“It’s a really tough matchup,” she said. “It’s not like we have easy matches. We have battles every single time.”
But her pundit’s hat soon came out, and her analysis was again on point.
“I do think that I’m able to take some time away from her,” she said. “I’m able to hit a low, flat ball, and not let her set up and go for her big shots, which is what she’s good at. I try to utilize that the best I can and then mix in some variety, change things up. We had a lot of cat-and-mouse points, and they mostly went my way. So that was good.”
