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Seven-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams reached the semi-finals of the 600,000-dollar WTA US Open tuneup here Friday with a 6-7 (4/7), 6-1, 6-4 victory over Meghann Shaughnessy.
Williams has won this tournament twice. But the 24-year-old is playing in just her third tournament of a season that included a six-month injury layoff between an early Australian Open exit and the WTA event in Cincinnati in July.
She reached the semi-finals in Cincinnati, then took another brief break to avoid overtaxing her left knee.
Williams, who rallied to beat seventh-seeded Daniela Hantuchova in three sets on Thursday night, wasted no time on Friday in digging herself out of the hole after dropping the first-set tiebreaker to Shaughnessy.
She won the second with three breaks of serve, Shaughnessy double-faulting on Williams's third set point.
But Shaughnessy, ranked 79th in the world, made Williams keep working. Williams broke Shaughnessy to love in the eighth game to serve for the match at 5-3, but dropped her serve for the first time in the match.
In the end, however, Shaughnessy went with a whimper. After saving one match point with an ace, she double-faulted on the next.
Williams now awaits the winner of the all-Serbian match-up between 10th-seeded Ana Ivanovic and No. 16 Jelena Jankovic.
Top-seeded Maria Sharapova will seek to maintain her momentum as she takes on fifth-seeded compatriot Dinara Safina.
Sharapova, who took a lengthy break herself in the wake of a semi-final exit at Wimbledon, returned to triumph in San Diego last week and has been untroubled in her march to the quarter-finals here.
She will have a chance to avenge a French Open fourth-round loss to Safina in June. In fact, Safina has won their last two encounters to even the series head-to-head at two victories apiece.
In the remaining quarter-final, third-seeded Russian Elena Dementieva, ranked sixth in the world, takes on US wildcard Bethanie Mattek.
Mattek, ranked 128th, ousted eighth-seeded Italian Flavia Pennetta en route to the quarters.
bb/js06
Tennis-WTA-USA
AFP 112203 GMT 08 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
