Garbine Muguruza enjoyed a comfortable return to a grass court at the Birmingham Classic as she gears up to defend her Wimbledon title.<\/p>\n
The Spaniard, who will be looking to defend her most recent grand slam crownin the coming weeks, was at ease in her opener againstAnastasia Pavlyuchenkova, dropping just three games in a 6-1, 6-2 success.<\/p>\n
Muguruza may well hope for a tougher test next time out, againstBarbora Strycova, having cruised through this clash inside an hour without facing a break point.<\/p>\n
And she wasnot the only Wimbledon winner to progress, with two-time champion Petra Kvitova also comfortable in a 6-3 6-4 defeat ofBritish favourite Johanna Konta.<\/p>\n
Despite the comprehensive triumph, Kvitova felt she was tested by Konta and was pleased for the workout.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can expect some tough matches from the first round, which I think isgoodbecause you have to really show a great performance from the beginning,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Second seedElina Svitolina was worked rather more by Donna Vekic, who battled back from 6-1, 3-1 down to level before falling short in a 6-1, 3-6, 6-1 loss.<\/p>\n
Svitolinahas not lost a first-round match since Madrid in 2017 andis now on20 wins in a row in tournament openers, havingended the match by clinching five successive games.<\/p>\n
Nottingham Open champion Ashleigh Bartyovercame OceaneDodin in straight sets but eighth seed Coco Vandeweghelost to Petra Martic.<\/p>\n
Alize Cornet and Julia Goerges are also through to the second round, beatingEkaterina Makarova and Maria Sakkari respectively.<\/p>\n
At the Mallorca Open, top seed and 2016 champion Carolina Garcia required three sets to defeat Hsieh Su-Wei, while the same was true of Victoria Azarenkaversus Stefanie Voegele and19-year-old Sofia Kenin againstKateryna Kozlova.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Garbine Muguruza enjoyed a comfortable return to a grass court at the Birmingham Classic as she gears up to defend her Wimbledon title. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34767","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\/34767","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=34767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34769,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34767\/revisions\/34769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}