Caroline Wozniacki and Venus Williams strolled into the quarter-finals of the Auckland Classic yesterday with straight-sets wins.
Williams had to work at the start of her second-round match with Japan’s fleet-footed Kurumi Nara, dropping serve twice before shifting up a gear to cruise home 6-4, 6-1.
Although the win was comfortable, the 34-year-old American was unsatisfied with the way her usually venomous serve misfired, delivering a less than 50 percent success rate.
Photo: AFP
She plays Russian Elena Vesnina in the quarter-finals, after the Russian breezed past Croatian teenager Ana Konjuh 6-3, 6-1. Head-to-head, Vesnina leads Williams 2-1 although Williams won their last encounter in Dubai 11 months ago.
The pressure was reversed for top seed Wozniacki of Denmark, who cruised through the first set against rising American Taylor Townsend, but struggled to get home in two sets 6-1, 7-6 (7-4).
Wozniacki’s first serve worked a treat, with an 81 percent success rate and no double faults, but she had difficulty dealing with Townsend’s switch to go to the net more in the second set.
The left-handed American broke serve to lead 4-2 in the second set, but double-faulted when serving for the set and Wozniacki closed out the tiebreak with an ace.
Of the other seeded players still alive, seventh seed Coco Vandeweghe beat last year’s semi-finalist Kirsten Flipkens of Belgium 6-1, 6-7 (7-5), 7-5, while in an all-US clash, Lauren Davis disposed of sixth seed Sloane Stephens 1-6, 6-4, 6-1.
In Perth, Australia, Poland were on the verge of reaching their second successive Hopman Cup final after beating Great Britain 2-1 at the Perth Arena yesterday.
Polish pairing Agnieszka Radwanska and Jerzy Janowicz remain unbeaten in the mixed teams tournament after claiming the deciding mixed doubles rubber against Heather Watson and Andy Murray in the Group B tie.
Radwanska reached the final last year, teaming with Grzegorz Panfil in Poland’s Hopman Cup debut.
Janowicz and Radwanska only need to beat French duo Alize Cornet and Benoit Paire tomorrow to advance to the final. Radwanska said hers and partner Grzegorz Panfil’s defeat in last year’s final at the hands of Cornet and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga would motivate her in tomorrow’s tie.
Radwanska gave the Poles the early ascendancy yesterday. She was far too good for the 50th-ranked Watson, winning plenty of cheap points through Watson’s errors in a 65-minute 6-3, 6-1 win.
World No. 6 Murray levelled the tie with an impressive 6-2, 6-4 win over Janowicz. The Scot dropped the first two games against the dangerous Janowicz, but then reeled off nine successive games to take total control.
In the mixed doubles, the Polish side were always in control en route to their 6-4, 6-4 win, creating 15 break points to their opponent’s three during the match.
ANFIELD BLUES: Kylian Mbappe arrived at Anfield on a run of 21 goals in 17 games, but he managed just three attempts in the match, none of them hitting the target Kylian Mbappe has been nearly unstoppable this season, but he hit a roadblock in their UEFA Champions League match at Anfield on Tuesday. For the second year running, the Real Madrid forward had a night to forget at Merseyside as Liverpool won 1-0. Mbappe looked a shadow of the player who has been tearing defenses apart all season. “We were lacking that threat in the final third,” said Madrid coach Xabi Alonso, without naming Mbappe individually. The FIFA World Cup winner for France rarely looked capable of finding a breakthrough against a Liverpool team who have been so defensively fragile for much of the
LOCAL SUCCESS: In the doubles, Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia defeated Italians Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in straight sets Elena Rybakina on Monday punched her ticket to the WTA Finals last four with an impressive 3-6, 6-1, 6-0 victory over second seed Iga Swiatek in round-robin play in Riyadh. After cruising past Amanda Anisimova in her opener on Saturday, Rybakina claimed her second win of the week to guarantee herself top spot in the Serena Williams Group. Anisimova on Monday rallied back from a set and a break down to triumph 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 in her all-American battle with seventh seed Madison Keys, who has been eliminated from the competition. “Madi was playing so well, it was quite a battle out there,”
For almost 30 minutes, Vitomir Maricic did not take a breath. Face down in a pool, surrounded by anxious onlookers, the Croatian freediver fought spasming pain to redefine what doctors thought was possible. When he finally surfaced, he had smashed the previous Guinness World Record for the longest breath-hold underwater by nearly five minutes. However, even with the help of pure oxygen before the attempt, it had pushed him to the limit. “Everything was difficult, just overwhelming,” Maricic, 40, told reporters, reflecting on the record-breaking day on June 14. “When I dive, I completely disconnect from everything, as if I’m not even there.
An amateur soccer league organized by farmers, students and factory workers in rural China has unexpectedly drawn millions of fans and inspired big cities to form their own, raising hopes China can grow talent from the ground up and finally become a global force. The nation of 1.4 billion people has about 200 million soccer fans, more than any other country, but it has failed to build world-class teams, partly due to a top-down approach where clubs pick players from a very small pool of prescreened candidates. The professional game is marred by a history of fixed matches, corruption, and dismal performances,
RSS