Quebec’s Leylah Annie Fernandez’s run at the Charleston tennis tournament ended in the second round on Wednesday.
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The 51st player in the world lost her flag in two sets with 7:5 and 7:6(8) against the Spaniard Paula Badosa. The 12th seed at the South Carolina event took 1 hour and 53 minutes to win.
Fernandez got into trouble while in possession. She committed seven double faults and hit 62% of her first attempts.
The 20-year-old was broken three times after hitting 10 break points in that clash.
This setback saw Fernandez fail in his bid to advance to the second round of a tournament for the first time since attending Auckland in early January. Since then, the Montreal native has competed in seven WTA events.
Later in the day, Canada’s Katherine Sebov will try to surprise Charleston against Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic. The latter is the fourth seed of the event.
A very bad first run sinks Eugenie Bouchard
Eugenie Bouchard was completely outplayed in the first set and couldn’t turn the tide, although she held her ground much better in the rest of their second round duel at the Bogota tournament.
The Quebecer lost to the Russian Kamilla Rakhimova 0: 6, 7: 6 (7) and 4: 6.
Bouchard hit just 46% of his first serve attempts and was broken three times in the first set. She bounced back after that and was a lot more combative, she notably having two match points in the second set tiebreak.
In the final, Rakhimova scored the only break in the set in the 10th and final game.
Also in Colombia, Canadian Carol Zhao beat Francesca Jones, ranked 817 in the WTA rankings, 6-2, 6-1. The Briton capitalized on the generosity of the 174th player at the top of the world serving and broke it no fewer than seven times.