Simona Halep roared into the third round of the Indian Wells WTA tennis tournament, overpowering Kristyna Pliskova 6-4, 6-4 on Friday.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old Romanian will meet the winner of a match between American wildcard Caroline Dolehide and Dominika Cibulkova, of Slovakia.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was ready to play. I was ready to work and ready to fight,\u201d Halep said. \u201cIt was a nice day.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t an easy match. But I am really happy I won my first match here and I get a chance to play again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Halep and Caroline Wozniacki have been taking turns at No. 1 this year.<\/p>\n
Denmark\u2019s Wozniacki took the world number one ranking after winning the Australian Open but Halep reclaimed it from her just prior to the elite Indian Wells hardcourt event.<\/p>\n
Wozniacki will play her first match of the tournament on Saturday against qualifier Lara Arruabarrena.<\/p>\n
The 2015 Indian Wells champion Halep won 58 percent of her first serves and made just one double fault in the 75 minute match.<\/p>\n
Pliskova, who is ranked 77th in the world, blasted eight aces but had her serve broken six times as she struggled mightily with her second serve.<\/p>\n
Halep won three out of the final four games in the second set, claiming victory when Pliskova sailed a forehand long on the first match point.<\/p>\n
Halep, who lost to Wozniacki in a three set final at the Australian Open, is still seeking her first Grand Slam title.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, ninth seeded Petra Kvitova won her 14th straight match to equal the longest winning streak of her career by outlasting Yulia Putintseva 6-7 (4\/7), 7-6 (7\/3), 6-4.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of tough to explain, because it was really up-and-down,\u201d Kvitova said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mental side wasn\u2019t really tough, I have to say. It was a good point and I was up mentally, and then it was a bad point, and I was down. That was almost all match.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rising star Jelena Ostapenko battled her way into the third round of the WTA Indian Wells WTA tournament, outlasting Swiss Belinda Bencic 6-4, 3-6, 6-1.<\/p>\n
The 20-year-old reigning French Open champion will next face Petra Martic of Croatia who beat Czech 26th seed Barbora Strycova 7-5, 6-4.<\/p>\n
In other women\u2019s matches on Friday, Japan No. 1 Naomi Osaka cruised past veteran Agnieszka Radwanska, of Poland, 6-3, 6-2 and former US Open winner Svetlana Kuznetsova was bundled out of the tournament by Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus in straight sets 6-4, 6-3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Simona Halep roared into the third round of the Indian Wells WTA tennis tournament, overpowering Kristyna Pliskova 6-4, 6-4 on Friday. The 26-year-old Romanian will meet the winner of a match between American wildcard Caroline Dolehide and Dominika Cibulkova, of Slovakia. \u201cI was ready to play. I was ready to work and ready to fight,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24367","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\/24367","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=24367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24369,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24367\/revisions\/24369"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}