Iga Swiatek made a winning start to her North American hard-court swing but it didn’t go without drama even though the Pole appeared to be heading toward a very dominant win in her opener.
On Wednesday evening, Swiatek started her Cincinnati run after a first-round bye with a 6-0 6-7 (6) 6-2 win over world No. 69 Varvara Gracheva. At one point, Swiatek led 6-0 5-2. But then, she missed out on five match points in the second set and Gracheva somehow managed to survive for another set.
In the first set, Swiatek annihilated Gracheva as she didn’t face any break points nor she allowed her opponent to have a single game point.
Swiatek’s dominance continued at the start of the second set as the Pole claimed an early break and opened a 5-2 lead. That’s when the current world No. 1 started to complicate things as she didn’t convert any of her four match points in the eighth game and she also failed to realize another match point in the 12th game.
In the second-set tie-break, Swiatek was also up 4-1 before Gracheva went on to overturn the deficit and convert her fifth set point to send the match into a decider.
Swiatek then took care of business and didn’t allow Gracheva to complete a shocking comeback
After stunningly failing to get the job done in two sets, Swiatek blew an early third-set break but then claimed back-to-back breaks and won the last four games of the match to set up a third-round meeting against No. 15 seed Marta Kostyuk.
While Swiatek’s opening performance versus Gracheva didn’t go smoothly, the five-time Grand Slam champion probably won’t be too hard on herself considering that she revealed earlier this week that her plan was to use Cincinnati as a practice event.
“We’re taking it easy, doing everything step by step. For sure, it’s not going to be perfect from the beginning but I had a couple days to really get used to the surface, so I’m trying to do the best job possible every day and entering the court next day knowing I can do something better. I’m going to treat it as a practice tournament. Not in a way that I don’t care but in the way that I want to implement all the stuff I’ve been practiced, and I think that’s the best approach for me,” Swiatek said in her pre-tournament presser.
