Taiwan’s Chan Yung-jan and Chang Kai-chen matched their performances at Wimbledon earlier in the year by reaching the second round of the women’s singles at the US Open on Tuesday.
Chan beat Anne Keothavong of Britain 2-6, 6-1, 6-1 to reach the second round of the year’s final Grand Slam after recovering from an awful start in her first-ever match against the Londoner.
Keothavong broke Chan in the first game of the match, the Taiwanese failing to win a single point from her opening four serves, before Keothavong earned a second break to go 4-1. She went on to take the set in only 30 minutes.
PHOTO: AFP
There followed a sudden and complete reversal of fortunes, and as the Briton had dominated the first set, so Chan was always in control in the second. She broke Keothavong in the second game and didn’t look back as the 26-year-old British No. 3 failed to hold her serve once.
Chan had to work harder in the 54-minute final set, but broke the world No. 142 in the third game before going on to take the decider on her second match-point.
Next up for Chan is Austrian world No. 198 Tamira Paszek, who beat Evgeniya Rodina of Russia 6-2, 3-6, 6-0.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Chang earned an impressive 6-2, 6-4 victory over Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro to set up a second-round showdown with top seed Caroline Wozniacki. The 20-year-old from Taoyuan needed only 35 minutes to claim the first set from Suarez Navarro, who at 61 is ranked 24 places higher than Chang. Although the Spanish Fed Cup player put on a better show in the second set, it was too little, too late.
One slight cause for concern for Chang will be the six double-faults she served, with any repetition against Wozniacki likely to prove costly.
Should Chang pull off an upset and defeat the Dane, she could face Chan in round three if her compatriot beats Paszek.
In the first round of the men’s doubles, Sergiy Stakhovsky and Mikhail Youzhny beat Taiwan’s Lu Yen-hsun and Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia 7-6, 7-6.
The Ukrainian/Russian duo won a marathon first set tiebreak 14-12, before claiming the contest by winning the second set tie-break 7-2.
In the men’s singles, Rafa Nadal made a smooth start to his bid to capture the one Grand Slam that has eluded him when he wore down Russia’s Teymuraz Gabashvili 7-6, 7-6, 6-3 in the first round on Tuesday.
Dressed menacingly in an all-black outfit, Nadal had to dig deep to see off the stubborn Gabashvili after three hours of intense shot-making from both men at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Neither player dropped serve in the opening two sets, but Nadal’s superior big-match experience came through when it mattered and he won both tiebreakers, before Gabashvili finally cracked in the third set.
“I prefer to play one hour and 10 minutes,” Nadal said. “Everybody wants to win easier. [When] you play against [lower-ranked] players they don’t have much to lose, so they play aggressive.”
Nadal’s straight sets win capped another dramatic day when most of the results went according to the script, but not before some brutal contests for three former finalists on a sweltering hot day at Flushing Meadows.
Novak Djokovic dispelled his reputation as a quitter after battling through five grueling sets, while Jelena Jankovic and Svetlana Kuznetsova were pushed to the brink of exhaustion as temperatures soared to 35ºC.
World No. 3 Djokovic looked to be heading for an early exit when he fell two sets to one and a service break behind fellow Serb Viktor Troicki, but somehow he summoned up the strength to fight back and win 6-3, 3-6, 2-6, 7-5, 6-3.
His incredible performance came on a day when organizers invoked the tournament’s rarely used extreme weather policy and fans fled the stands to seek refuge in the shade from the blazing sun.
For most of his match, Djokovic was soaked in sweat and gasping for air, playing an opponent showing no signs of weariness.
It was only in the fifth set, when the sun began to set and Troicki started to wilt, that relief finally came.
“It was like, I don’t know, sleeping with my girlfriend, I guess, kind of feeling,” Djokovic told the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Jankovic, a finalist in New York in 2008, beat Romanian Simona Halep 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 after Kuznetsova, champion in 2004 and runner-up in 2007, had to work overtime to beat Japan’s Kimiko Date Krumm 6-2, 4-6, 6-1.
“It’s not easy to play in these kind of conditions,” Jankovic said. “You have to just try your best.”
Under the tournament’s extreme heat policy, players are allowed to request a 10-minute break between the second and third sets if the mercury exceeds 30.1ºC before the start of the match.
Kuznetsova’s match on the Grandstand court began before the policy was invoked, meaning the players could not have a break between sets, but they were given ice packs at the change of ends and were sheltered by umbrellas.
Maria Sharapova, the 2006 US Open champion, was also given a tough workout by Australia’s Jarmila Groth in their match, played at dusk when the weather had cooled, before prevailing 4-6, 6-3, 6-1.
Sharapova’s compatriot and Wimbledon finalist Vera Zvonareva had a much easier time against Slovakia’s Zuzana Kucova at the Louis Armstrong Stadium, winning 6-2, 6-1.
After two days of few surprises, eight seeded players made early exits in the severe conditions.
The biggest casualty in the men’s draw was Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus, seeded 16, while the highest women’s seed to fall was China’s Li Na, seeded eighth.
The exception was Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki, last year’s runner-up and the top seed this year in the absence of world No. 1 Serena Williams.
Her match did not begin until just before midnight local time because of the earlier backlog, but she made up for lost time by thumping US wild-card Chelsey Gullickson 6-1, 6-1 in just 61 minutes.
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