It was an awkward controversy that preceded what promises to be an intriguing first meeting between Jessica Pegula and Mirra Andreeva. The two will face off for the first time in a professional singles match in the WTA Finals semifinals, days after Pegula’s hot-mic comments about the Russian made headlines. The American secured her knockout-stage spot with a hard-fought 7-6(2), 4-6, 7-5 victory over Linda Noskova. And while Pegula is looking forward to finally facing Andreeva, she knows the challenge will be anything but easy.

“Well, I was like, the storylines just write themselves. It’s the match people wanted, well, now you’re going to get it,” she said on The Tennis Channel. “No, I mean, she’s played great. I watched her play Sabalenka. I feel like she’s such an efficient player. I feel she moves so efficiently, she is fast. I think she has a great serve. She’s strong, she hits the ball pretty hard, and she’s smart. You could see how efficient she made her tennis look against Sabalenka.”

With two of the world’s top-ranked players set to meet, predicting the winner of Jessica Pegula and Mirra Andreeva’s maiden professional singles encounter is no easy task. But Pegula is confident that fans are in for an entertaining contest.

“But yeah, I’m going to do my best. It’s crazy. We’ve literally only practiced twice, and we’ve never played each other. So, it’s kind of a weird feeling knowing that you’re playing at the WTA Finals. Like, that doesn’t happen very often. So, I think it will be a good match,” she added.

There is considerable hype surrounding their upcoming clash, partly because of the hot-mic controversy that erupted ahead of the WTA Finals. Pegula was caught making critical remarks about Andreeva during a private conversation with her coach, Mark Knowles, following a practice session involving the two players. The conversation was inadvertently captured by microphones during the WTA’s YouTube livestream.

At one point, Pegula became frustrated and remarked that the youngster needs to be humbled. She also sarcastically called Andreeva a ‘diva’ and wasn’t happy with her on-court behavior despite leading 4-0. While this controversy could have created a rift between the two, things mellowed after they had a private conversation and set aside their differences. In fact, Pegula has now revealed that Andreeva didn’t take it all too seriously.

“I think we’ve all seen that Mirra has a pretty good sense of humour with everything,” she told Christian’s Court. “So, she was totally fine, and she said she embraces it, so it was kind of funny. I was like, maybe I need a little bit more of that in myself on the court. But yeah, it was all good.”

Pegula, hence, joked that the label had rubbed off on her. “Maybe she turned me into a diva. Diva energy,” she told Tennis Channel, adding that Andreeva’s reaction was that people call her that all the time, as if she did not care. The American has vowed to embrace the tag herself, adding, “I like it.” The nickname has since become a running joke between the two.

Andreeva posted a photo of them from the WTA Finals media activities on Instagram, captioned “DIVAS” with nail-polish and kissing emojis, and Pegula replied in the comments, “Divas in Chanel.” Madison Keys, working as an analyst for Sky Sports at the tournament, also greeted Andreeva with a smiling “Hi diva” and a hug.

Moreover, as Andreeva shared, Pegula came up to her on the same day, a couple of hours after the session, to apologize in person. “I really appreciated that she came up to me on the same day,” the teenager told journalist Christian Basnight in the mixed zone after beating Elina Svitolina, though she chose to keep the details of the conversation private. “Obviously, she apologized. So yeah, there is no drama or anything behind it. Now we’re able to laugh about it,” she added.

Pegula Explains Why Her Clashes With Noskova Feel Like Chess Matches

Pegula’s path to the semifinals was anything but smooth. She began her campaign with a three-set loss to Gauff, then beat Marta Kostyuk in straight sets. That left her needing to beat Noskova, who had already booked her knockout spot with two wins, and the task grew heavier when Gauff beat Kostyuk 6-4, 7-5 on a sun-soaked Stadium Two earlier on Thursday.

The match itself was a back-and-forth contest that lasted two hours and 45 minutes. Pegula broke twice in the first set, and Noskova broke straight back both times, but the tiebreak went heavily the American’s way, 7-2. Pegula then went up a break in the second, only for Noskova to come roaring back and force a decider, which the Czech opened with a 2-0 lead.

Pegula got the break back, saved a match point on her own serve at 4-5, and then took the last three games, breaking in the 11th and serving it out in the 12th. Her serving numbers were modest, with her first-serve percentage dropping from 61% in the first set to 50% in the second, but she made up for it with a career-high 16 aces.

Pegula then said the tension is nothing new for the pair. Every match between them turns out this way, she explained, and it is “flip a coin who’s gonna win,” although Noskova had taken the last few, which made her glad to come back in the third and “get it done.” She put it down to their similar styles. Both like the ball lower and flatter, and both change direction well, which makes it “a little chess match back and forth.” She also feels that, for whatever reason, she returns Noskova’s serve very well.

With her season on the line, Pegula leaned on a simple message. “I just kept telling myself, ‘This could be your last match for the year, so go out and compete, and you can hold your head high for the rest of the year.’ But I definitely wanted another chance to still be here,” she said in her post-match press conference.

She added that she wanted to give herself a chance to still win the match because “it’s not over,” and she drew on their history of up-and-down encounters in which both had come back before. Knowing that the gap was not that big mattered, she said. She also reminded herself that she was playing well and just needed to give herself the best chance, and that if this was her last match of the year, she wanted to compete in front of the fans: “This is why I’m here.”

Pegula admitted she was frustrated early on because she felt she was playing better than the scoreline suggested. Noskova had not found her serve for the first set and a half, she said, but then her own serve dipped. She gave up too many looks on her second delivery, which let the Czech settle into a rhythm.

When Noskova went up 2-0 in the decider, Pegula was not sure what to do, but she was still getting into plenty of Noskova’s service games and returning well, so she told herself to find a way back and focus on her own serve. “I served much better in the third set, and I think that helped me,” she said.

The serve became the talking point afterward. Pegula joked that nobody had given her credit for the 16 aces, insisting she had “turned it around this year,” and described the shot as a work in progress that sometimes shows up and sometimes does not. She likened her approach to pitching, changing up speed and pace to find her timing again, and admitted she had not served well in her first couple of matches before this one. “Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason,” she told reporters. She also laughed that the serve had finally arrived after disappearing in the second set.

Pegula’s win sets up her first meeting with Andreeva in the semifinals, while Noskova will take on the winner of the Sabalenka-Svitolina round-robin decider in the other.