Two hundred sixty-eight points played. Two hundred eight minutes on court. Thirty-seven break point chances between two players who refused to go down without a fight on Saturday night in Indian Wells. But in the end, only one number mattered: one, as in the one player who could walk off victorious, and on this night, it was Katerina Siniakova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The former doubles World No. 1 outlasted No. 27 seed Leylah Fernandez 5-7, 6-4, 7-6 (1) in 3 hours and 28 minutes to advance to the third round of the BNP Paribas Open for the second straight year, in what stands as the second-longest match on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz this season.<\/p>\n
Indian Wells:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n And in keeping with the theme of seconds, it\u2019s not only Siniakova’s second win over Fernandez in four meetings, but also her second in a row, despite the match feeling for long stretches like Fernandez’s to lose.<\/p>\n Fernandez saved an endless barrage of break points in a game featuring six deuces to hold for 4-3, then earned the first break of the match a few games later to claim a marathon opening set. And even after Siniakova took a 3-0 lead in the second set — finally converting her first break point on her 10th chance in the opening game — Fernandez stormed right back, breaking for 3-1 before leveling at 4-all.<\/p>\n The tide briefly turned toward the Czech as she won back-to-back games to send the match to a decider, but Fernandez struck first in the third set, taking a 3-1 lead and appearing well on her way to victory. But Siniakova refused to let the gap widen, breaking back for 3-2 and saving a pair of break points to hold for 4-4, all of this back-and-forth leading to the most fitting of endings: a third-set tiebreak.<\/p>\n Well past the three-hour mark at this stage, the match came down to one question: which player would best keep her composure?’<\/p>\n It was Siniakova who provided the answer, staying within herself as a string of unforced errors off the Fernandez forehand proved to be the Canadian’s undoing, and Siniakova’s ticket to the third round. The match finished just three minutes shy of the season’s longest contest, a 3-hour, 31-minute thriller between Elsa Jacquemot and Marta Kostyuk in the first round of the Australian Open.<\/p>\n The final numbers weren’t the flashiest, as her marks of 64% of first-serve points won and 49% of second-serve points won were partially offset by a 4-for-19 conversion rate on break points (Fernandez was 4-for-18) — but they were enough to set up a first-time meeting with Mirra Andreeva.<\/p>\n If she can overcome the 18-year-old, Siniakova would advance to the fourth round of the BNP Paribas Open for the first time in singles, though she is former champion at the event in doubles.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two hundred sixty-eight points played. Two hundred eight minutes on court. Thirty-seven break point chances between two players…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747,83],"class_list":["post-526335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526335","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=526335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}