SHENZHEN, China – Japan’s women’s tennis team, without the injured Naomi Osaka, went out in the first round of the Billie Jean King Cup Finals on Thursday after losing two singles matches to Britain.<\/p>\n
Seventh-ranked Japan failed to get a single set off second-ranked Britain as Ena Shibahara lost to Sonay Kartal 6-3, 7-6 (4) and Moyuka Uchijima fell to Katie Boulter 6-2, 6-1 in Shenzhen, China, where a best-of-three-matches format was in play.<\/p>\n
“I wish I could restart the match,” said Shibahara after struggling with both her serves and groundstrokes before a fightback fell short in the second set.<\/p>\n
The two defeats meant the doubles match, seen as “Japan’s strong point” by skipper Ai Sugiyama, was a dead rubber.<\/p>\n
“A team doesn’t get stronger without the development of individuals,” she said. “I need to provide them impetus, too.”<\/p>\n
Britain joined Italy, Ukraine and the United States in reaching the semifinals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHENZHEN, China – Japan’s women’s tennis team, without the injured Naomi Osaka, went out in the first round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-153565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}