Emma Raducanu made an impressive start to her Indian Wells campaign by recording a comprehensive straight-set victory over Russian Anastasia Zakharova.<\/p>\n
British number one Raducanu was all smiles as she waved to the crowd after completing a 6-1 6-3 win at the prestigious WTA 1,000 event in California.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old, who received a first-round bye as the 25th seed, will face world number six Amanda Anisimova in the third round if the American can overcome Russian Anna Blinkova.<\/p>\n
“I think my game was in a really good place,” Raducanu told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“I hadn’t necessarily felt so good for the last month, so I’m really pleased with the work we did for the last week and just for it to transfer on the match court like that. It gives you huge confidence that you are doing the right thing.<\/p>\n
“Today’s match was a great display for myself of how I want to be playing, of what I want to be feeling like when I’m on the court.”<\/p>\n
Following Raducanu’s second-round exit at the Australian Open in January, the 2021 US Open champion reached only the second final of her career in Cluj but then failed to win a match in Doha or Dubai.<\/p>\n
In a dominant first-set display against Zakharova, she won 80% of points behind her first serve and conceded just six points across four service games.<\/p>\n
The 86th-ranked Zakharova, 24, resisted a break point in the opening game of the second set – but Raducanu held to love before forcing the breakthrough at the next opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Raducanu made an impressive start to her Indian Wells campaign by recording a comprehensive straight-set victory over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-519443","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\/519443","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=519443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}