ABU DHABI \u2014 Canada’s Leylah Fernandez was eliminated in the second round of the Abu Dhabi Open tennis tournament with a 6-3, 6-2 loss to McCartney Kessler on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Fernandez, who was seeded sixth at the WTA 500 hard court tournament, was broken five times on 10 chances while only converting one of her six break points.<\/p>\n
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The 23-year-old from Laval, Que., struggled on serve and hit into eight double-faults.<\/p>\n
Fernandez picked up her only win of the season so far when she defeated Chlo\u00e9 Paquet 6-0, 6-3 in the first round at Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
She lost her first-round match at the Australian Open last month in Melbourne, as well as her opener in warm-up tournaments in Brisbane and Adelaide.<\/p>\n
Also Tuesday, Fernandez and Kristina Mladenovic of France fell 7-5, 3-6, 10-6 to Alexandra Eala of the Philippines and Janice Tjen of Indonesia in a first-round doubles match.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 3, 2026.<\/p>\n
The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ABU DHABI \u2014 Canada’s Leylah Fernandez was eliminated in the second round of the Abu Dhabi Open tennis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[2226,49,48,21072,43332,186508,82,593,944],"class_list":["post-453908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-abu-dhabi","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-leylah-fernandez","tag-mccartney-kessler","tag-open-tennis-tournament","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}