Italian veteran Flavia Pennetta upset China’s Australian Open champion Li Na to join Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanska in the women’s final of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells.
The 32-year-old Pennetta qualified for the biggest singles final of her career after a 7-6 6-3 drubbing of an out-of-sorts Li.
Pennetta will face Radwanska in the final after the Pole avenged her loss to Romania’s Simona Halep in Qatar last month with a 6-3 6-4 win on the Californian desert hardcourts.
Li beat Pennetta in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open in January but the Italian was too good this time.
Radwanska, ranked third in the world, sealed the first set with an ace after she broke Halep’s opening service game but found herself trailing the second when the Romanian broke.
But the 25-year-old Pole regained control, getting back on level terms then getting a second break and serving out her victory to reach her first final at Indian Wells.
“What I was trying to do was play aggressively from the beginning of the match and just try to go for my shots,” said Radwanska.
“I was lucky. I think I was serving better than other days, so that helped today as well.
“I think it was a pretty good match.”
Halep took some consolation from her defeat as she will rise to fifth place in the world when the new rankings are released tomorrow.
Li was promoted to the women’s top seed in the absence of world number one Serena Williams but had struggled with her serve all week.
She had similar problems against Pennetta, coughing up eight double faults in the first set alone, as the players traded eight service breaks before Pennetta won the tiebreaker.
For Pennetta, reaching the final capped an incredible year for a woman who was primarily regarded as a doubles player.
Less than a year ago, her singles ranking had plummeted to 166 and she was considering retiring, before she made a fairytale run at the US Open, reaching the semi-finals.
Meanwhile, Serbia’s Novak Djokovic and American John Isner cruised into the last four at Indian Wells with straight-sets wins in the quarter-finals.
Djokovic hardly raised a sweat as he eased to a 6-1 6-3 victory over Frenchman Julien Benneteau, before the towering Isner rode his booming serve to a 7-6 7-6 win over Latvia’s Ernests Gulbis.
Men’s semi-final: Federer bt Dolgopolov 6-3, 6-1.