Top seeds march on at Wimbledon
Source: Egyptian Gazette
LONDON – Barbora Krejcikova battled past American Caroline Dolehide6-4, 3-6, 6-2, Iga Swiatek rallied to beat American Caty McNally5-7, 6-2, 6-1, and Elena Rybakina cruised past Greece’s Maria Sakkari 6-3, 6-1to reach Wimbledon’s third round.
The Czech Krejcikova creaked into the third round, edging past Dolehide in a scrappy match more chaotic than a Henman Hill picnic under seagull fire.
Court Two spectators, many blissfully unaware they were watching the reigning champion, might be forgiven — Krejcikova herself barely looked the part.
A season dogged by back and thigh niggles has left her short of sharpness, and her patchy 4-3 record for the season coming in was on full display in a match strewn with errors.
Still, the 17th seed did just enough to scrape through to gentle applause and a sterner test ahead: 10th seed Emma Navarro, who won’t be quite so generous.
Rybakina was gifted a break in the opening game when Sakkari produced three successive double faults and the 2022 Wimbledon champion held firm from there to wrap up the opening set with minimum fuss in front of a sparse crowd on Court One.
The 26-year-old dropped her serve in the opening game of the next set but responded immediately to get things back on track and then broke to love for a 3-1 lead, before proceeding to take apart former world number three Sakkari.
A backhand error on match point compounded Sakkari’s woes and Rybakina celebrated the victory in typically muted fashion, with either Denmark’s 23rd-seeded Clara Tauson or Russian Anna Kalinskaya awaiting her in the next round.
Seventh seed Mirra Andreeva blasted her way into the third round with a 6-1 7-6(4) victory over Italy’s Lucia Bronzetti and thanked her coach, former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez, for making her work hard.
The 18-year-old Russian was the only teenager from six women’s starters to have made it through to the second round and she looked sure-footed on Wimbledon’s grass, the surface where she hit the headlines aged 16 with a whirlwind race to the fourth round in 2023.
She completely dominated her 26-year-old opponent in the first set on Thursday using her big serve, heavy slice and neat net play to wrap it up in 23 minutes.
But she had a fight on her hands in the second as Bronzetti, ranked a lowly 63, found her stride and range in the second. Andreeva eventually triumphed on her second match point in the tiebreak, with a fine forehand volley winner.
“I got a little bit nervous and she started to play better,” Andreeva said in a courtside interview before adding she would not be getting much time off because she had doubles to play and then Martinez would want to run over some elements of her game.
“She’s not going to let me go home,” the Russian said.
“She pushes me to my limits so thanks for that, I guess,” she added to smiles from Martinez in the coaches’ box on Court One.
Spaniard Martinez was an unheralded winner of the title in 1994, beating nine-times champion Martina Navratilova in the final.
McNally, the world number 208, looked poised to cause an upset when she clawed her way back from 4-1 down to take the first set against the five-times Grand Slam champion.
At that point Swiatek’s mediocre record at the All England Club, where the Pole has never gone past the quarter-finals, seemed to be weighing heavily on her shoulders.
But rather than shy away from the scrap, the former world number one flicked a psychological switch that saw her come out for the second set transformed, upping her aggression and playing with a ferocity McNally simply could not handle.
She broke early in the second set and never looked back, losing only three more games to set up a clash with another American Danielle Collins.
“I started the match well so I knew that my game was there,” said Swiatek. “I knew that at the start of the second set I had to be more accurate. I just tried to improve and I’m happy it worked.”
The eighth seed may have her sights set far higher than the third round, but by reaching the last 32 she underlined her consistency on the big stage.
The 23-year-old is the third player this century to reach the third round in 22 consecutive women’s singles Grand Slams after Amelie Mauresmo and Serena Williams.
Whether such milestones are enough to persuade Swiatek she can excel on a surface that has so far proven difficult to master is yet to be determined.
With four French Open titles to her name, another at the U.S. Open and two semi-final appearances in Australia, her unspectacular Wimbledon record stands out like a sore thumb.
A run to the Bad Homburg final in the grasscourt warm-up event showed her game is not entirely unsuited to the surface, though there was a period in the first set against McNally where she may have wondered if this tournament was simply not for her.
Having broken early and raced into a 4-1 lead, the wheels briefly came off as McNally did everything to push Swiatek out of her comfort zone.
The American pushed right up to the baseline to receive serve, trying to give Swiatek less time to react to the return and for a while it worked.
The original article: belongs to Egyptian Gazette .
