No. 3 seed Jessica Pegula produced a commanding performance to defeat Sofia Kenin 6-3, 6-1 in 56 minutes, reaching the third round of the US Open for the seventh straight year.<\/p>\n
Pegula, who will become World No. 1 for the first time if she wins her first Grand Slam title and Elena Rybakina loses before the semifinals, improved to 47-12 this season and 5-2 against Kenin. It was their most one-sided meeting by some distance: their first four matches, played between 2016 and 2021, all went three sets.<\/p>\n
Pegula has won their past three meetings in straight sets, but this was the first time she held Kenin to fewer than eight games.<\/p>\n
“Every match we’ve played throughout the years has been very tough,” Pegula said in her on-court interview. “Sonya’s given me a lot of trouble in the past, she’s a great player and a champion. I was just trying to stay focused on what I needed to do, and luckily was able to be pretty efficient out there today.”<\/p>\n
Pegula, the 2024 runner-up, will next face the 2021 runner-up. No. 31 seed Leylah Fernandez. Fernandez had not won a Grand Slam match in 2026 before this week but defeated Mananchaya Sawangkaew 6-4, 6-1 to book her place in the US Open third round for a third time.<\/p>\n
Pegula leads their head-to-head 3-1, with all meetings coming on North American outdoor hard courts. The most recent was in this year’s Miami third round, which Pegula won 6-2, 6-2.<\/p>\n
Practice pays off for Pegula’s service dominance:\u00a0<\/strong>Pegula served notice of how dialed in she is on her delivery this week in her first-round win over Elena-Gabriela Ruse, in which she conceded only seven points on serve.<\/p>\n The 32-year-old repeated that feat against Kenin. Once again, she dropped seven points behind her delivery, and this time, she didn’t even face a break point. Her five aces took her tournament total so far to nine.<\/p>\n “I’m going for my spots,” Pegula explained in her on-court interview. “I’m going pretty big on second serves, I’m trying to mix up where I’m going and just trust that I can hit good serves in the moment. That’s been a lot of work we’ve done off court, so really excited when I can practise something and it pays off in the match.”<\/p>\n Pegula’s serve may have been responsible for the eyebrow-raising numbers, but her return game was on fine form as well. While Kenin gifted the opening break to her on a double fault, Pegula’s grit saw her convert a fourth break point to move up 2-0 in the second set, and she found her best backhand returns of the day to seize the double break for 4-0.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 3 seed Jessica Pegula produced a commanding performance to defeat Sofia Kenin 6-3, 6-1 in 56 minutes,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1183089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,661,16,15],"class_list":["post-1183088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117203408367038982","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1183088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1183089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}