Asheville,
\nSerena Williams was understandably far from her best in her return to competition but the greatest player of her generation said it was a positive step toward her goal of returning to the pinnacle of her sport.<\/p>\n
Williams, playing her first official match since having a baby, and older sister Venus were beaten in a dead doubles rubber by the Netherlands in the Fed Cup in Asheville, North Carolina, but walked away feeling upbeat. \u201cI honestly feel better than I thought I was going to feel,\u201d said Williams, who prior to Sunday had not played a competitive match since her 2017 Australian Open victory. \u201cI feel like I didn\u2019t expect to play, you know, like that for me. I feel like I\u2019m on the right track.\u201d Williams, who gave birth to her first child last September, showed glimpses of both her prowess and rust during the 6-2 6-3 loss to Demi Schuurs and Lesley Kerkhove. USA secured a 3-1 victory in the first round over the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
Sharapova knocked out of Qatar opener by Niculescu<\/p>\n
Maria Sharapova looked out of sorts after surrendering an early advantage as she was stunned 4-6 6-4 6-3 by Romanian qualifier Monica Niculescu in the Qatar Open first round. Earlier, Dominika Cibulkova rallied past Russia’s Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 7-6(8) 6-4 as she progressed to a second round meeting with France’s seventh seed Caroline Garcia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Asheville, Serena Williams was understandably far from her best in her return to competition but the greatest player of her generation said it was a positive step toward her goal of returning to the pinnacle of her sport. Williams, playing her first official match since having a baby, and older sister Venus were beaten in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21782,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21780\/revisions\/21782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}