World number one Iga Swiatek started the grass court season with a three-set victory at the WTA 250 Bad Homburg Open. The Polish tennis player lost the first set, but managed to overcome the resistance of the 2022 Wimbledon finalist Tatjana Maria (germany) by 2-1 (5:7, 6:2, 6:0) and qualified for the second round.
This is the eighth win in a row for Iga Swiatek and since the beginning of the year she has a balance of 36 wins and only 6 defeats. Her participation is her debut at the WTA 250 Bad Homburg Open and comes two weeks after her second Roland Garros title.
Iga Swiatek started the match with an early break and confidently took a 3:1 lead in the opening set. But in the eighth game on her serve and 40:30, she suddenly lost her rhythm, conceded a break, then another in the final game of the set and was already trailing in sets. In those moments, Tatjana Maria showed some excellent backhand performances and made the most of the mistakes of the leader in women’s tennis at the moment.
Despite winning the Wimbledon girls’ title five years ago, Iga Swiatek remains the toughest on grass and has yet to win a title. But she seemed to learn her lesson after the break and from that moment until the end of the match she gave only two games to the German, leading 3:1, followed by a second break and 5:1.
At the end of the match, the statistics showed winning 82% of the first serve and 31 out of 46 possible second serves, as well as no break points given in the second and third sets to her opponent.
Her next opponent is Jil Teichmann (Switzerland), who started with success over Claire Liu (USA) with 2-1 (3:6, 6:3, 6:4).
The 5th-seeded Bianca Andreescu (Canada) had some tense moments, but in the end she managed to cope with the wildcard Sonai Kartal (Great Britain) 6:2, 3:6, 7:5 in 2 hours and 27 minutes. For the former US Open champion, it was her second victory in a third grass court in the past month. She reached the second round at the WTA 250 Libema Open, but crashed out at the start in Berlin.
In other matches of the first round, Katerina Siniakova defeated Elisabetta Cocciaretto (Italy) by 2-0 (6:3, 6:4), and the American player Emma Navarro dealt with Nadia Podoroska (Argentina) by 2-0 (6:2, 6:0).
