3.30pm EDT
15:30
Today’s match is the first US Open final between teenagers since 1999, when Serena Williams saw off Martina Hingis for the first of the American’s 23 career major titles. Our Tumaini Carayol has written about their unlikely convergence today in the world’s biggest tennis stadium and what it means for the sport moving forward.
Over the past 20 years, as memories of Martina Hingis, Venus Williams and Serena Williams battling for glory in grand slam finals as teens faded deep into the memory of professional tennis, it soon became clear that the era of teenage supernovas had abated.
While there have been numerous anomalies since, including the recent triumphs of Bianca Andreescu and Iga Swiatek, with the rise of technology and augmenting physicality within the sport teenagers have been brushed aside.
Not this time. After one of the most manic grand slam tournaments in recent years, the last players standing in the women’s draw are two youngsters, 19-year-old Leylah Fernandez and 18-year-old Emma Raducanu, who had the audacity to ignore convention and believe that they could win each match ahead. With every round they have passed and each career-best victory achieved, they took it. On Saturday, they will be the first pair of teens to face each other in a grand slam final since Serena Williams and Hingis at the US Open in 1999.
3.16pm EDT
15:16
Hello and welcome to Arthur Ashe Stadium for today’s US Open women’s final between Emma Raducanu and Leylah Annie Fernandez. It’s a showdown that would have been unthinkable at the start of the fortnight, but we’re less an hour away from a best-of-three-sets match between a pair teenagers ranked 73rd and 150th with $2,500,000 (GBP1,807,000) in prize money and a grand slam championship on the line.
The players should be on court in a little over an hour but we’ll be with you throughout the final run-up on a cool 76F (24C) afternoon at the Billie Jean King USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows.
3.00pm EDT
15:00
Bryan will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s a little more on the players’ journeys to this point:
There’s unexpected and there’s this: a US Open final between two teenagers ranked 73rd and 150th in the world.
That’s where things stand after Thursday’s extraordinary women’s semi-final twin bill at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the latest shocking development at the season-ending grand slam which, despite the absence of some of the sport’s brightest stars, continues to unfold in the most unpredictable of ways.
Thirty-eight months ago, Emma Raducanu and Leylah Annie Fernandez met in the second round of the Wimbledon girls’ singles. Now they will cross paths for the first time since then with all to play for in the world’s biggest tennis stadium: a $2.5m cheque and what surely will go down as the unlikeliest US Open championship on record – regardless of who wins.
“Obviously since then we’ve both come very far in our games and as people,” Raducanu recalled in Friday morning’s dizzying aftermath. “I’m sure it’s going to be extremely different to when we last encountered each other. But we’re both playing good tennis so it will be a good match.”
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