Iga Swiatek scored her first win of the grass-court season at the Bad Homburg Open on Tuesday by topping\u00a0 Victoria Azarenka in straight sets, 6-4, 6-4.<\/p>\n
Competing for the first time in nearly three weeks — since her 26-match Roland Garros winning streak ended at the hands of Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals — the fourth seed rallied from a 4-1 deficit in the opening set to beat Azarenka for the fifth straight time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Swiatek recognized the importance of overcoming a slow start against Azarenka, also a former No. 1, who came through qualifying and defeated German Laura Siegemund in the first round.<\/p>\n
Swiatek finished the match with four breaks of Azarenka’s serve, and hit 25 winners and six aces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first few games, I thought I was playing really well, and I had opportunities to break her, but I didn\u2019t,\u201d Swiatek said. \u201cI kind of got maybe less intense, but I wanted to keep doing what I know I can do, and at the end, it was a great match.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was my first match on grass this year, actually having byes in these tournaments is not always a great thing because I want to play on grass as much as possible right now, but I\u2019m really happy that I\u2019m through to the next round.\u201d<\/p>\n
The win was also notable in that it was the 300th match-win of Swiatek’s career.<\/p>\n
Swiatek will face the winner of Wednesday’s second-round match between No. 8 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and wild card Maria Sakkari in the quarterfinals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iga Swiatek scored her first win of the grass-court season at the Bad Homburg Open on Tuesday by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,661,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-211376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-text","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211376","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=211376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}