Wawrinka, Nadal battle into French Open title match

Sunday’s French Open championship match will be a showdown between two players who have combined for 10 winners’ trophies at this tournament and 17 Grand Slam titles overall.

Rafael Nadal has accounted for most of those, with nine victories at Roland Garros and 14 major titles. Stan Wawrinka, though, is no slouch in the department of career accolades. The third-ranked Swiss has won three different slams once apiece: the French Open, the Australian Open, and the U.S. Open.

These two future Hall of Famers are now set to go head-to-head for the Coupe des Mousquetairs after they picked up respective semifinal wins on Friday. Wawrinka outlasted Andy Murray 6-7(6), 6-3, 5-7, 7-6(3), 6-1, while Nadal cruised past Dominic Thiem 6-3, 6-4, 6-0.

Wawrinka vs. Murray is currently the longest match of the event at four hours and 34 minutes. The final set, however, lacked the drama of the first four. Murray found himself within one tiebreaker of crossing the finish line only to see it go all downhill once he lost the fourth.

“He played better in that set,” the top-ranked Scot said of his opponent. “I lost a little bit of speed on my serve which wasn’t allowing me to dictate many points on my own serve. Yeah, that was it. I mean, he obviously hit some greats shots in the fifth, but I didn’t keep the score close enough to sort of put him under pressure. It’s a lot harder to pull off some of the shots that he was hitting at the end if the score was a bit closer, and wasn’t able to do that.”

“I think it was mentally a tough battle today,” Wawrinka added, “especially in five sets against Andy. “But I’m happy with what I did on the court, the way I was fighting, even if I was down. The way I was trying to keep being aggressive, keep going even if I lost a lot of points by some incredible defense from him.

“You know what’s happening when you play in [a Grand Slam semifinal]. You have to accept it. You just need to keep fighting and keep going for it.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Nadal was not tested in the day’s second semifinal–just as he wasn’t in the first round, the second round, the third round, the fourth round, and the quarters.

The fourth-seeded Spaniard brushed aside Thiem in just two hours and seven minutes. That Nadal committed 12 fewer errors than the seventh-ranked Austrian is no surprise, but he even fired more winners (23 to 21).

“Before [the third set] was I think a good match,” Nadal assessed. “He was a little bit unlucky, in my opinion. He had 15-40, 1-all, 15-40, 3-1 for me, 15-40 for him. So he didn’t convert the chances and completely (changed) the match.

“[In] these kind of matches, (if) you don’t get that opportunities then you are in trouble. He had opportunities in the first, opportunities at the beginning of the second, and then I think I played well.I played a solid match and (it) was tougher for him.”

“Today I was not able to produce my best tennis at all,” Thiem concluded. “But it doesn’t have to do anything with this stage or with the occasion, because I also played bad matches in different tournaments in earlier rounds. So it doesn’t have to do anything with the occasion or that it was a Grand Slam semifinal here on the center court.”

Nadal will be back Court Philippe Chatrier on Sunday afternoon, when he and Wawrinka will square off for the 19th time in their careers. The world No. 4 is leading the head-to-head history by a commanding 15-3 margin.

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