Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei on Wednesday advanced to the second round of the women’s doubles at the All England Club, while Caroline Wozniacki suffered fresh Wimbledon woe as the world No. 2 suffered a shock 6-4, 1-6, 7-5 defeat to Ekaterina Makarova in the second round of the singles before telling the Russian: “You won’t go far.”
Hsieh and Lucie Hradecka took just 63 minutes to complete a 6-3, 6-3 victory over British duo Katie Boulter and Katie Swan.
The 14th seeds saved four of five break points and converted four of six, winning 67 of the 107 points contested.
Photo: EPA
The Taiwanese-Czech duo next face a second-round clash with either Veronika Kudermetova of Russia and Belarussian Aryna Sabalenka, who Hsieh partnered in Eastbourne last week, or Danielle Collins of the US and Jessica Moore of Australia.
In the singles, Wozniacki, plagued by an invasion of flying ants during the Court One clash, saved five match points, but has now failed to get past the round-of-16 in 12 visits to the All England Club.
It was a bitter defeat for the 27-year-old Dane, who was expected to challenge for the Wimbledon title after winning her maiden Grand Slam crown at the Australian Open in January.
Wozniacki then told Makarova not to get too optimistic about making a deep run at the All England Club, despite the Russian winning the women’s doubles title last year.
“I think she played above her level and really raised it and got a little lucky, and played well when she needed to,” said Wozniacki, who also lost to the 30-year-old in the second round of the US Open last year.
Wozniacki had won all of their seven previous meetings up to that point.
“I don’t know that she would be able to keep up this level for the rest of the tournament,” she added.
Russian world No. 35 Makarova, who next faces Czech world No. 66 Lucie Safarova, shrugged off Wozniacki’s unflattering summary of her chances.
“I don’t know what to say. Yeah, maybe I was lucky today. Good for me. Thank God,” Makarova told WTA Insider.
Flying ants also did their best to darken Wozniacki’s mood.
The former world No. 1 asked the umpire if there was something that could be sprayed to keep the bugs away.
“They’re in my mouth, and in my hair and everywhere — we need to do something. Is there a spray?” she said. “I want to be here to focus on tennis, not eating bugs.”
Wozniacki arrived in southwest London in good form on grass following her victory in Eastbourne last week, but once again she exits Wimbledon in embarrassing style, leaving the grass-court Grand Slam as the only one of the four majors at which she has never reached the quarter-finals.
Makarova said in the aftermath of her victory that she had tried not to think about the match points slipping away.
“I couldn’t win with a lot of match points, but I kept fighting and playing an aggressive game, and finally it worked,” said Makarova, who had led 5-1 in the final set.
“I was really nervous, because you need to win this point. When it was 5-5, I started thinking about those match points on my serve at 40-0, but I told myself: ‘No, you are not going to lose this match.’ I forgot it and started over,” she added.
Makarova, playing in her 44th consecutive Grand Slam, is hoping to emulate her run to the Wimbledon quarter-finals four years ago when she was beaten by Safarova.
The Russian has twice made the semi-finals at a Grand Slam — both at the US Open in 2014 and 2015.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS