Konta’s feat on clay goes on

Jo KoNTA continues to be a good advertisement for the benefits of playing in the Fed Cup after reaching the first significant clay court final of her career. The British No 1 defeated Ajla Tomljanovic 6-2, 7-6 yesterday to reach the championship match of the WTA Tour event in Rabat, Morocco. It is the first time Konta has made a final since last year’s Nottingham open. Her win over world No 43 Tomljanovic was her sixth consecutive victory since the Easter weekend Fed Cup triumph indoors at the Copper Box in London, when GB defeated Kazakhstan. It is her best sequence since the heady days of 2017 when she rose to the top 10 and made the Wimbledon semi-finals. In today’s final she will meet Maria Sakkari from Greece on a surface which has, broadly, been Konta’s least favourable. She has enjoyed some decent individual wins on the brown dirt but has yet to win a main draw match at the French open. It would not be the first time that a player has been boosted by the experience of winning team matches under pressure and then doing well on the solo tour. Konta’s recent run of successes enabled her squeeze through yesterday’s second set tiebreak 9-7 against a player ranked four places higher than her, seeing off the Croatian-born Australian in a relatively brief 91 minutes.