With the majority of the crowd against her, Yulia Putintseva turned her attention to a song about rabbits.<\/p>\n
Her Australian Open opponent, Turkish qualifier Zeynep Sonmez, was backed by a raucous following in Melbourne after forcing a deciding set in their tight third-round match.<\/p>\n
So Putintseva, in an attempt to block it all out, repeated the words of a song from an old Russian movie in her head, rather than her usual go-to artist Taylor Swift.<\/p>\n
She admitted that was not her usual coping mechanism – but it proved a necessary distraction as she came through to win 6-3 6-7 (3-7) 6-3 in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
After completing victory, Putintseva responded to the jeers that came her way by cupping one ear and blowing kisses to the crowd, before provocatively dancing her way off the court.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old, booed as she celebrated her victory and throughout her post-match interview, said: “I think there was a lot of disrespectful moments. They were screaming between my first and second serve really loud to make me make a mistake.<\/p>\n
“On a big point, a guy started coughing for my shot. I was like, ‘OK, I’m not going to lose’.<\/p>\n
“Some people have an education of tennis and, unfortunately, some of them do not.”<\/p>\n
She joked: “I’m very happy that I kept my calm, because Yulia last year would probably throw something at them at some moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the majority of the crowd against her, Yulia Putintseva turned her attention to a song about rabbits.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-433183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433183","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=433183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}