Keys started the year in superb fashion, beating two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in Melbourne to win a first Grand Slam title.<\/p>\n
But after reaching the quarter-finals of the French Open, the 30-year-old suffered a surprise third-round Wimbledon exit to 37-year-old Laura Siegemund.<\/p>\n
In New York, Keys made 37 unforced errors in the first set alone but managed to take it on a tie-break after Zarazua spurned five set points.<\/p>\n
The match looked there for the taking for Keys as she breezed to a 3-0 lead in the next set, but the 2017 runner-up in New York then lost four games in a row.<\/p>\n
She managed to take the set to a tie-break but double faults and errors helped Zarazua force a decider.<\/p>\n
Keys’ coach and husband Bjorn Fratangelo offered advice and encouragement throughout – at one point saying: “It’s just a sport, nothing’s riding on the line” – but the American’s play remained erratic.<\/p>\n
“I want to win, but [I was] just feeling like winning matters way too much. I just couldn’t quite separate myself from that,” Keys added.<\/p>\n
“Once you start playing badly, it just kind of all snowballs.<\/p>\n
“I felt like I was just slow, I wasn’t seeing things the way that I wanted to, which I feel like resulted in a lot of bad decisions and lazy footwork.”<\/p>\n
Zarazua secured her first victory against a top-10 player when Keys netted on match point, sparking wild celebrations among the Mexican’s support team after a contest lasting three hours and 10 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keys started the year in superb fashion, beating two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka in Melbourne to win a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":175951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[62,1464,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-175950","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-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115092888221798514","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}