Nothing should take away from how brilliant Siegemund was. She stepped forward to the Sabalenka serve, taking it on early, and chopped her way through her opponent’s huge groundstrokes.<\/p>\n
Sabalenka held serve just once in the opening set – and even that required three deuce games – and quickly found herself a double break down.<\/p>\n
She rescued one as Siegemund served for the first set at 5-2 but slapped a return into the net to concede the opener in 57 minutes.<\/p>\n
Sabalenka immediately left the court to reset herself and it seemed to have worked. She broke straight away for a 2-0 lead but, visibly unsettled, conceded it in the next game.<\/p>\n
The match could have slipped away in Sabalenka’s next service game as she was taken from 40-0 to deuce – but roared on by the crowd, she held, then won four games in a row to force a decider.<\/p>\n
An early break to love in the third set – secured on a brilliant passing winner from Siegemund – looked to have rattled Sabalenka.<\/p>\n
She should have broken back in the next game but ended up falling to her knees at the net, arms outstretched as she sent the passing shot wide to go 3-1 down.<\/p>\n
In a nervy ending, Sabalenka broke back, immediately conceded it and then capitalised as Siegemund served to stay in the match, ultimately securing victory with a relieved-looking smash at the net.<\/p>\n
“It doesn’t matter if you are a big-hitter or a big server – you have to work, run and earn the victory,” Sabalenka added.<\/p>\n
“It is tough, but beautiful.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nothing should take away from how brilliant Siegemund was. She stepped forward to the Sabalenka serve, taking it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-249967","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-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114821702888185890","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249967","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=249967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}