roland garros 2026 — wta semifinals preview
the four semifinalists are set and none of them have won a grand slam. for the first time since 1977, there is no former major champion in either the men’s or women’s semifinals at a grand slam. the four women left standing are marta kostyuk, mirra andreeva, diana shnaider, and maja chwalinska — a madrid champion, the tour’s win leader, a player who has just beaten the world number one from a set and a double break down, and a qualifier who arrived in paris ranked 114th and is now in the top 30 in the live rankings. the draw could not have produced a more honest result: the bracket is the field, with nothing left to protect any hierarchy that existed before the tournament began.
semifinal 1: marta kostyuk (15) vs. mirra andreeva (8)
the first semifinal is a rematch of the madrid final three weeks ago, where kostyuk won the title and extended her unbeaten clay run to what has now become 17-0. andreeva lost that final but has won 20 clay matches this season and arrived in paris as the player with more wins in 2026 than anyone else on the tour. between them they hold the two best clay records of anyone in the draw. one of them will reach a grand slam final for the first time. the other will not.
the quarterfinals: what each player showed
kostyuk vs. svitolina — 6-3, 2-6, 6-2
the quarterfinal was one of the most revealing matches of the tournament so far. kostyuk broke twice in the first set and served crisply throughout, taking it 6-3 in 38 minutes while svitolina — the rome champion who had beaten bencic in three sets in the round of 16 — looked marginally hesitant on the return. the slow start that had characterised all four of svitolina’s previous paris matches arrived one more time, and this time it cost a set.
the second set was svitolina’s answer. she led 3-0 by replicating the structure kostyuk had used in the first, staying collected despite being a set down, and produced the most composed service games of her week to close it 6-2. the match was level and the question of which player would manage the third set’s pressure better had no obvious answer.
the third set provided one. the first five games produced five consecutive breaks of serve, both players losing serve twice, with kostyuk going into the changeover at 3-2. from that moment she became irresistible. she held to love, broke again, held to love a second time, and served out the match with a hold that svitolina threatened with two break points but could not convert. kostyuk lost her serve four times across the entire match. she won the match because from 3-2 onward in the third set she did not allow svitolina another look.
what the match confirmed is that kostyuk’s return game is still the instrument that defines her week. she pressed on every second serve, kept the ball flat and low through the return court, and denied svitolina the net approach opportunities that had been the most consistent weapon of the rome champion’s paris campaign. kostyuk extends her clay winning streak to 17-0. svitolina had reached the roland-garros quarterfinal six times in her career. she has lost all six.
andreeva vs. cirstea — 6-0, 6-3
played under the closed roof of court philippe-chatrier as rain arrived in paris, andreeva produced what was one of her best performances of the entire tournament. the statistics tell the story faster than any narrative can: six straight games in 22 minutes. 85% of first-serve points won in the opening set. nine winners in those first six games alone. cirstea, who had lost only nine games across four rounds and had beaten sabalenka in rome, was broken three times in the first set without finding a moment to settle.
the instrument here was the forehand. andreeva finished with 18 winners, 11 of them off that wing, and won 88% of points on cirstea’s second serve — a number that rivals the return dominance kostyuk has shown against the field across the entire clay season. cirstea changed her approach at the start of the second set, broke early and held to reach 3-3, and for six games the match looked competitive. then andreeva broke again, held to love, and closed it 6-3 in 57 minutes total. she converted all six of her break point opportunities across the match.
the roof was closed throughout, the conditions producing the lower, faster bounce that suits andreeva’s topspin forehand more than the high-bouncing outdoor clay of the opening week. she adapted immediately. cirstea did not. the proof was in the numbers: cirstea produced just four winners across the entire match. her tournament, the best of her career since 2009, ended without the semifinal she had come within one match of reaching.
this is andreeva’s second career grand slam semifinal, both at roland-garros, two years apart at ages 17 and 19. she leads the wta tour with 34 wins in 2026. 20 wins in her last 23 matches.
the head-to-head: kostyuk leads 2-0, including the madrid final
kostyuk leads the head-to-head 2-0 and has not dropped a set in either meeting. both matches have been on clay. in madrid three weeks ago she won the final 6-3, 7-5 — the same mechanism in both sets: return pressure creating break-point opportunities, and conversion when they came. andreeva was competitive in both sets but could not convert when the score was most live. kostyuk closed both sets from positions of control. the pattern across two clay meetings is consistent enough to be called a template.
what kostyuk needs to do
andreeva’s first-serve percentage was 85% in the cirstea opening set, the cleanest single serving passage of her paris week. at that level, kostyuk’s return platform is reduced — the ball is out of reach before she can step inside the baseline and redirect flat. the break opportunities will come later, from longer exchanges, rather than from the second-serve strikes that broke świątek and svitolina. the specific adjustment is reading andreeva’s serve early and not overcommitting to the backhand side — andreeva’s first serve into the body is the delivery that most disrupts kostyuk’s preferred flat return position.
what andreeva needs to do
kostyuk’s return sits inside the baseline on second serve and sends the ball flat and low across the court. the result is a ball that stays below the topspin contact zone andreeva’s forehand is built around, which is why her break-point conversion in madrid was zero when it mattered. the answer is a first-serve percentage above 75% and second-serve variation in placement, kicking high into the body rather than going flat to a corner, to prevent kostyuk from reading the delivery and stepping in. the net game is the secondary option: coming forward on short balls forces kostyuk into passing shots from positions she prefers not to play from, and andreeva’s net efficiency against cirstea — all six break points converted, most of them finished at the net — confirmed the approach is reliable when built correctly.
what will decide the match
the second-serve exchange rate. kostyuk won 88% of second-serve return points in her best performances this clay season. andreeva won 88% on cirstea’s second serve in the quarterfinal. if kostyuk finds that platform against andreeva’s delivery, the match follows the madrid pattern. if andreeva lands above 75% on first serves and varies the second serve enough to deny kostyuk the step-in position, the rally extends into five-to-seven shot exchanges where andreeva’s forehand builds the geometry she wants. the madrid head-to-head gives kostyuk the structural advantage. andreeva’s quarterfinal numbers give her the tools to change it.
semifinal 2: diana shnaider (25) vs. maja chwalinska (q)
the draw has produced a semifinal between two left-handers who share a surface, a generation, and almost nothing else in terms of the paths that brought them here. shnaider arrived in paris ranked 23rd, with five career titles across three surfaces and a season record of 13-11. chwalinska arrived ranked 114th, having come through qualifying, with two career clay titles and a single grand slam main-draw win to her name before the tournament began. shnaider beat the world number one to reach this stage. chwalinska beat the 22nd seed in a match packed with twelve breaks of serve. both are in a grand slam semifinal for the first time.
the quarterfinals: what each player showed
shnaider vs. sabalenka — 3-6, 7-5, 6-0 (2h12)
sabalenka took the first set 6-3 and led the second 4-1. she converted her first four break point opportunities and was two points from the match serving at 5-4 in the second set. as the wind picked up across chatrier in the middle of the second set, sabalenka fell into the pattern that has ended her runs before: pressing harder instead of resetting, errors compounding errors. shnaider broke back. broke again. held. one set each.
the third set was not a contest. sabalenka described it afterward as falling into a very deep mental place she could not get out of. she committed 14 unforced errors against 14 points won in the set alone. her 57 total unforced errors across the match were more than double shnaider’s 26. in the fourth game of the decider she missed a volley and crouched with her head resting on her racket. in the sixth game she stood still and screamed at herself after going 0-30 down. she saved two match points at 0-40 before sending the final shot into the net. shnaider won the last ten games of the match. the third set was 6-0.
shnaider produced a level high enough to capitalise rather than simply waiting for the collapse. not every player can beat sabalenka even when she is struggling — the pace and placement are still present even without the mental clarity — but shnaider served cleanly, kept her unforced errors at half the sabalenka count, and used her left-handed forehand to find the contact zone she had been searching for in the first set. early, flat, inside the baseline. sabalenka’s first-serve percentage, above 70% in every previous paris match, offered no structure to resist it. shnaider is the fourth player since wta rankings began in 1975 to win a grand slam third-set 6-0 against the world number one, after steffi graf at roland-garros in 1995, serena williams at the 2005 australian open, and maria sharapova at the 2006 us open.
chwalinska vs. kalinskaya — 7-6(3), 6-3 (1h54)
kalinskaya broke in the opening game. chwalinska broke back immediately and won five consecutive games to lead 5-1, using the skidding left-handed slice and angled forehand drives that have been the two constants of her paris week. kalinskaya stopped her from serving out the first set twice — clawing the set back to 5-4, then 6-5 — before the first set reached a tiebreak.
the tiebreak produced the defining sequence of the match. chwalinska finished a 27-shot rally with a drop shot and lob combination that kalinskaya applauded, then won a 25-shot exchange in the tiebreak itself with a clay-court craft point that dismantled kalinskaya’s defensive position for the pivotal point. the tiebreak went 7-3.
the second set showed what chwalinska does once the momentum is established. she held kalinskaya to winning 51% of first-serve points and 25% of second-serve points across the match. she converted seven of the eight break points she earned. she broke twice in the second set and closed it 6-3. her best consecutive run reached five games. even when kalinskaya found the lines — a perfectly disguised drop shot drew applause — chwalinska reset quickly, returned to depth, and continued pinning kalinskaya behind the baseline with a combination of high topspin forehand and skidding slice that denied a consistent exchange height.
kalinskaya’s total came to 95 winners across the tournament but 164 unforced errors — a ratio that reflects the high-risk, high-reward game that carried her through the potapova super tiebreak but ultimately ran out of structural reliability against a player who made fewer mistakes at the moments that decided games. chwalinska equalled nadia podoroska’s 2020 result as the best run by a women’s qualifier at roland-garros in the open era. she entered the tournament with two career tour-level clay wins. she now has eight.
head-to-head: no meetings at any level
their one prior meeting was a futures match in istanbul in april 2022, shnaider won in straight sets, which is the kind of data point that tells you nothing useful about thursday. the more relevant frame is what each player has shown in paris this week: shnaider’s flat left-handed forehand finding its contact zone early and low, chwalinska’s high topspin and skidding slice varying the exchange height from game to game. chwalinska came through the junior ranks alongside iga świątek, spent years on the itf and wta 125 circuits, and has now earned more in prize money this week than in her entire career before paris. shnaider is two and a half years younger. it ends for one of them in the semifinals.
what shnaider needs to do
chwalinska’s two weapons are the skidding left-handed slice, which keeps the ball low and fast after the bounce, and the high topspin forehand that lifts the ball above the comfortable strike height. both work by denying the opponent a consistent contact zone. the answer is early ball contact: stepping inside the baseline and taking the ball before it climbs removes the height variation. shnaider did this in the second and third sets against sabalenka and against keys in the deciding set. the specific risk is the skidding slice to the backhand: shnaider’s two-handed backhand is a flat driver, and when the ball arrives below her preferred strike zone after a skidding bounce, the return loses pace and direction. taking that ball early, before it skids through the bounce, is the adjustment that prevents chwalinska from controlling the exchange height.
what chwalinska needs to do
shnaider’s left-handed forehand struck from inside the baseline is the weapon chwalinska has not encountered at this level this week. kalinskaya’s flat forehand was the closest precedent, and chwalinska handled it by keeping the ball high over the net with topspin — the answer that produced five consecutive games from 1-1. against shnaider’s left-handed forehand the geometry changes: the natural cross-court angle from a left-hander’s forehand goes to chwalinska’s two-handed backhand, and the inside-out forehand goes to her forehand side. chwalinska needs to redirect the cross-court ball from her backhand with slice into the shnaider forehand to break the angle, rather than going down the line where the pace differential is largest. the left-handed wide serve in the deuce court goes to chwalinska’s forehand and that is the one delivery she can step into and redirect at pace, and it needs to be attacked when it arrives.
what will decide the match
two things. rally height: shnaider’s game produces flat exchanges at ground level, chwalinska’s raises the ball above the comfortable contact zone with topspin and varies it downward with slice. the player who controls the height of the average exchange controls where the point is decided. shnaider wants it low and early, chwalinska wants it high and disruptive. on chatrier clay the higher bounce works in chwalinska’s favour unless shnaider takes the ball early from inside the baseline.
the second thing is set management under pressure. shnaider’s defining quality this week has not been winning clean sets — it has been not losing when the match turns. she broke back from 4-1 down against sabalenka and took the second set 7-5 without a tiebreak. against keys she lost the second set and responded with a 6-0 third. chwalinska won the kalinskaya tiebreak 7-3 after her lead disappeared and the first set reached 5-5. both players have shown they do not break under scoreline pressure. the first set will be close, it has been for both of them, and the player who manages the pivotal game in it will carry the momentum into a second set that neither of them has yet had to win from behind.
disclaimer: i am not listing sources here simply because of how much additional editing and formatting it would require
