Marta Kostyuk v Mirra Andreeva: French Open 2026, women’s semi-finals – live

Updates from Paris with Shnaider v Chwalinska to follow
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Salut! At the start of the tournament we were wondering how we’d cope without ‘just’ Carlos Alcaraz. But then Jannik Sinner departed and Novak Djokovic too, and then Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff along with nearly all of the men’s and women’s top ten, and it’s still been joyeux and amusant and incroyable. And after Aryna Sabalenka snatched defeat from the jaws of victory yesterday, guaranteeing two first-time grand slam champions this weekend, there’s a wonderfully exciting sense of the unknown and the feeling that anything could happen on women’s semi-finals day – but it’s also impossible to ignore the shadow that Russia’s war in Ukraine has cast over the draw.

No one has felt that shadow more painfully this fortnight than Marta Kostyuk, who found out hours before her first-round match that a missile had struck close to her family home in Kyiv. Aged 23, it has taken Kostyuk time as a player to piece her rich talents together. Now, fuelled by the knowledge she represents something so much bigger than herself while simultaneously being able to put tennis into perspective, she’s on a 17-match winning run on clay and is playing with the belief she belongs at the top – but in Russia’s Mirra Andreeva she faces the highest-ranked player left who was already being ordained as a future slam champion when she burst into the semi-finals as a precocious 17-year-old in 2024.

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