Maya Joint’s run at the Canadian Open in Toronto has come to an end, but not before giving her more experienced opponent Liudmila Samsonova an almighty scare.<\/p>\n
The young Australian and Samsonova were involved in a titanic struggle on Grandstand court before the Russian triumphed 7-5 6-7 (6-3) 6-2.<\/p>\n
Joint went toe-to-toe with the world No.55 and made her work for almost three hours in hot and humid conditions.<\/p>\n
It was always going to be a tough encounter between two players high on confidence after their morale-boosting second-round wins in a WTA-1000 tournament.<\/p>\n
Joint came into the last-32 contest fresh from eliminating world No.18 and 14th seed Sorana Cirstea in straight sets, while Samsonova bundled out world No.26 and No.22 seed Barbora Krejcikova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Russian seized the initiative by taking the first set, but only after Joint gave her much to think about after clawing her way back from 5-1 down. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In the second, the 20-year-old showed maturity beyond her years to hold her nerve and prevail in a tiebreaker to level the match.<\/p>\n
They each held serve at 2-2 in the deciding set before the 27-year-old Samsonova, making full advantage of her top-spin forehand and moving her younger opponent around the court, earned a vital break in the fifth.<\/p>\n
It proved pivotal as Samsonova added more heat by holding serve and breaking Joint again to complete a tough win.<\/p>\n
Also in the round of 32, Canadian Leylah Fernandez took full advantage of her local support by destroying No.5 seed Mirra Andreeva in straight sets.<\/p>\n
Fernandez beat the world No.5 Andreeva 6-1 6-4 to send the reigning French Open champion packing in an hour and 20 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maya Joint’s run at the Canadian Open in Toronto has come to an end, but not before giving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":848403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,64469,31229,85,747],"class_list":["post-848402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-liudmila-samsonova","tag-maya-joint","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848402","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=848402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/848403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}