The second-seeded group of Ottawa’s Gabriela Dabrowski and New Zealand’s Erin Routliffe moved on to the semifinals of the Dubai Tennis Championships with a 6-4, 6-4 quarterfinal victory over Ukraine’s Lyudmyla Kichenok and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia on Thursday in Dubai Metropolis.
Routliffe, who resides in Montreal, and Dabrowski received 76 per cent of their first serves and had been profitable on three of 5 breakpoint alternatives in a match that took 84 minutes to finish.
It was a rematch from this 12 months’s Australian Open semifinals, which Kichenok and Ostapenko received 7-5, 7-5.
Dabrowski and Routliffe, who’re the reigning U.S. Open champions, will meet the fourth-seeded duo of Australia’s Storm Hunter and Katerina Siniakova of Czechia in Friday’s semifinal.
Hunter and Siniakova secured their semifinal spot by defeating the unseeded pair of Aleksandra Krunic from Serbia and Shuko Aoyama from Japan 7-6, 6-4 on Thursday.
