WTA Tour<\/a>. “I think we both were pretty tired when it came to the tiebreak. I think I felt like I was lucky enough to have some good shots in the great moments.”<\/p>\nThe contest was the latest chapter in a budding rivalry between two of the top-10 players in women’s tennis.<\/p>\n
They met for the first time last month in the final of the Adelaide International, with the 18-year-old Russian winning 6-3, 6-1.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t really have a specific tactic against her,” Mboko said. “But I know she slices really well, and she hits really low. I think she forced me to hit those (slices and spins). She covers the court really well, so I think for me it was just trying to find the little window to open the court. Yeah, I just found myself hitting those kinds of shots because that’s all I felt I could do.”<\/p>\n
Mboko improved her record to 11-3 this season. The 19-year-old from Toronto is coming off a breakout 2025 campaign in which she won two titles, including a 1000-level crown at the National Bank Open in Montreal.<\/p>\n
She entered the Qatar Open with a career-high world ranking of 13th and could potentially break into the top-10 with a win in the quarterfinals.<\/p>\n
Mboko will next face the winner of a third-round match between Australian Open champion Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan and China’s Zheng Qinwen.<\/p>\n
In doubles action, Ottawa’s Gabriela and Brazil’s Luisa Stefani \u2014 the fifth seeds \u2014 earned a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Czech Marie Bouzkova and Russian Liudmila Samsonova. But Montreal’s Leylah Fernandez and France’s Kristina Mladenovic dropped a 6-2, 4-6, 10-4 decision to the fourth-seeded tandem of Anna Danilina of Kazakhstan and Serbia’s Aleksandra Krunic.<\/p>\n
\u2014 with files from Sportsnet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rising Canadian tennis star Victoria Mboko is through to the quarterfinals of the Qatar Open after upsetting fifth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-468902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468902","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=468902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}