{"id":30496,"date":"2018-05-08T11:41:32","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T11:41:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/punjabnews24.com\/?p=30496"},"modified":"2018-05-08T11:41:32","modified_gmt":"2018-05-08T11:41:32","slug":"djokovic-powers-past-nishikori-in-madrid-opener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/djokovic-powers-past-nishikori-in-madrid-opener\/","title":{"rendered":"Djokovic powers past Nishikori in Madrid opener"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Former world number one Novak Djokovic showed signs of a return to form with an impressive 7-5 6-4 victory over Japan&#8217;s Kei Nishikori in the opening round of the Madrid Open on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>Following early exits in Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Miami and Indian Wells, the 30-year-old Djokovic struck his shots with precision and recorded 26 winners to improve his head-to-head advantage to 12-2 against world number 20 Nishikori.<\/p>\n<p>Djokovic was broken to love at 2-2 but he recovered well by pouncing on his opponent&#8217;s second serve to clinch the opening set in just over an hour.<\/p>\n<p>The two-time winner in Madrid went on to claim a decisive break in the 10th game of the second set to wrap up the contest.<\/p>\n<p>It was Djokovic&#8217;s first victory over a top-20 opponent since the Serb overcame Gael Monfils at Eastbourne in June last year.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in the day, Canada&#8217;s Milos Raonic booked a second-round meeting with third seed Grigor Dimitrov, defeating Argentina&#8217;s Nicolas Kicker 6-3 6-2.<\/p>\n<p>Raonic recorded 17 aces to knock out the Madrid debutant.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former world number one Novak Djokovic showed signs of a return to form with an impressive 7-5 6-4 victory over Japan&#8217;s Kei Nishikori in the opening round of the Madrid Open on Monday. Following early exits in Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Miami and Indian Wells, the 30-year-old Djokovic struck his shots with precision and recorded 26 [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30497,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30496","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\/30496","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=30496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30498,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30496\/revisions\/30498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}