Something had to give at the Mutua Madrid Open on Sunday as two of the first three clay-court title-winners on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz this season — Marta Kostyuk and Jessica Pegula — faced off for a spot in the Round of 16.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both women entered the match with a 6-0 match record on the surface in WTA events this spring after taking home trophies in Rouen and Charleston, respectively, and winning their second-round matches. After 1 hour and 13 minutes on Arantxa Sanchez Stadium, Kostyuk earned a 6-1, 6-4 victory to be the one who kept her winning streak in tact.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With her 13th career Top 10 victory, Kostyuk advances to face Pegula’s compatriot, Caty McNally, for a spot in the quarterfinals. While Kostyuk will be bidding to reach the quarterfinals in Madrid for the second year in a row, McNally advanced to the fourth round of a WTA 1000 event for the first time in her career after saving two match points in a 6-3, 2-6, 7-6(2) win over Katerina Siniakova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More facts and figures from Kostyuk’s triumph included:\u00a0<\/p>\n
2: After losing four of the first five matches she played against Pegula, Kostyuk has now won two in a row in the head-to-head. She also beat Pegula 6-0, 6-3 in the semifinals of the Brisbane International in January.<\/p>\n
3: Kostyuk posted runs of three straight games three separate times in victory. She won the first three, and last three, games of the opening set, and also did it from 1-0 down in the second set.<\/p>\n
4: The Ukrainian broke Pegula four times on seven break-point opportunities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
8: Having also picked up a win over Magda Linette in Billie Jean King Cup Qualifiers for Ukraine, eight matches in a career-long winning streak for Kostyuk. After winning her first career title in Austin three years ago, her unbeaten was stopped at five matches.\u00a0<\/p>\n
10: In all, Kostyuk saved 10 of the 11 break points she faced — including all nine in the opening set. Four of those came in a five-deuce service hold for 3-0, and then she saved two more in each of the fifth and seventh games.<\/p>\n
20: Kostyuk recorded 20 winners in the win — far dwarfing Pegula’s nine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
27: Kostyuk was particularly effective when returning Pegula’s second serves. The American won just 27% of those points in the match.<\/p>\n
“I think it was a good match,” Kostyuk said in her on-court interview. “I played Jessica this year already, and she’s such a tough player, such a solid player, so I was going into this match fully ready for a big battle. I’m very, very happy to finish this in two.”<\/p>\n
“I think I’m definitely enjoying playing tennis since I got injured in the Australian Open. I had to rethink a little bit how to approach this and how much it costs me to be on this court — my energy, my physical energy. I’m very happy with the adjustments that we made, I’m very happy with the progress that we’re making as a team, and I think that’s all that matters.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never had such a long winning streak in my career, so we must be doing something right!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Something had to give at the Mutua Madrid Open on Sunday as two of the first three clay-court…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[82,483],"class_list":{"0":"post-12164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-madrid","8":"tag-madrid","9":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}