Sierra, who grew up playing on clay, broke Raducanu’s serve in the opening game, and things went downhill from there for the Briton.<\/p>\n
Raducanu hit 15 unforced errors to zero winners as Sierra broke twice more on her way to a first-set ‘bagel’.<\/p>\n
A downcast Raducanu took time off court before returning for the second set, and while she managed to get a game on the board early on, it remained plain sailing for Sierra, who put away a series of booming forehand winners to storm to a 4-1 lead.<\/p>\n
A break back gave Raducanu a glimmer of hope and belief started to creep in when she levelled the set at 5-5 with Sierra serving for the match.<\/p>\n
Sierra broke back immediately but once again failed to serve out the win as a resurgent Raducanu forced a tie-break.<\/p>\n
However, after clawing her way back to 5-4 from 5-1 down in the tie-break, Raducanu’s resistance let up and Sierra secured victory after an hour and 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
Raducanu has been blighted by illness and injuries in recent years and has only gone beyond the third round of a major once since her US Open win in 2021.<\/p>\n
Her focus will now turn to the British grass-court season as she continues to work with coach Andrew Richardson, who helped guide her to the Flushing Meadows title as a teenage qualifier and was re-hired by Raducanu earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Sierra will face either Italian 13th seed Jasmine Paolini or Dayana Yastremska of Ukraine in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sierra, who grew up playing on clay, broke Raducanu’s serve in the opening game, and things went downhill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-691285","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\/691285","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=691285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}