Canada’s Leylah Fernandez battled past Aliaksandra Sasnovich of Belarus 7-5, 6-7 (3), 6-3 on Wednesday to advance to the quarterfinals of the Ningbo Open.<\/p>\n
The 24-year-old from Laval, Que., needed three hours to defeat the world’s 122nd-ranked player and improve her career record against Sasnovich to 2-2.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fernandez, ranked 30th in the world, overcame 53 unforced errors and eight double faults to win her second straight three-set match. Sasnovich committed 73 unforced errors.<\/p>\n
She converted eight of 15 break-point opportunities, compared with five of six for Sasnovich, and sealed the victory on her first match point.<\/p>\n
Fernandez will next face Russia’s Ekaterina Alexandrova, who advanced Wednesday when third-seeded Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine withdrew from their match with an injury.<\/p>\n
Kostyuk’s withdrawal also secured the final spot at the season-ending WTA Finals for Karolina Muchova of the Czech Republic. Kostyuk needed to reach the Ningbo final to keep her qualification hopes alive.<\/p>\n
Muchova joins Elena Rybakina, Aryna Sabalenka, Mirra Andreeva, Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff, Elina Svitolina and Linda Noskova at the Nov. 8-15 event in Indian Wells, Calif.<\/p>\n
Fernandez and Kostyuk’s scheduled doubles quarterfinal Thursday against top seeds Nicole Melichar of the United States and Cristina Bucsa of Spain was cancelled following Kostyuk’s injury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada’s Leylah Fernandez battled past Aliaksandra Sasnovich of Belarus 7-5, 6-7 (3), 6-3 on Wednesday to advance to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":936629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-936628","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\/936628","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=936628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/936629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}