Keys to break into top 10 after reaching final in Birmingham

She won 6-3, 6-4 to claim her maiden Aegon Classic title following a rain-interrupted week in the Midlands.

American seventh seed Keys pulled off that kind of fightback for the second successive round as she defeated sixth-seeded Spaniard Carla Suarez Navarro 3-6, 6-3, 7-6 (3).

Strycova, who was playing her 18th set of the week after reaching both the singles and doubles finals, still had enough energy and tenacity to come close to turning the second set around.

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She only served at 57 per cent of first serves in the first set but Strycova struggled to deal with her return. Kerber failed to score match point in the ninth game, ultimately leading to her demise, as Suarez Navarro won three straight games to close out the defending champion after almost two hours of play.

“Getting all these matches in a row is a huge opportunity which will definitely help me at Wimbledon”, she acknowledged. She took the first set 6-3. The first set saw the Suarez Navarro win the first three games. She, then, rallied from 3-4 down on serve to snatch three consecutive games to take the trophy home, along with 470 ranking points and $146,200 as prize money.

These two have met three times in the past, and Keys has won two of those meetings. “I think she played one not-great game and that’s when I was able to break her”.

Had the Czech sneaked that she would have been serving to level the match, after which anything might have happened. “Much of the time I was concentrating on trying to get back into the match”.

“I love this surface, so the longer I am on it, the happier I am”. Strycova is going to have trouble keeping up in this one. “This year I really want to go further than the quarter-final I reached at Wimbledon last year”. Madison Keys holds the lone win in their head-to-head match up.

“I had to fight to play my best tennis to beat the best player”, Navarro said, though the seedings gave that accolade Agnieszka Radwanska, one of four well-known names to fail to make the last eight.