Canadian tennis players Bianca Andreescu and Denis Shapovalov opened their grass-court seasons with losses in first-round action at the Libema Open on Monday.<\/p>\n
Andreescu, from Mississauga, Ont., fell 6-1, 6-3 to third seed Elise Mertens of Belgium in the women’s draw at the 250-level event on the ATP and WTA tours.<\/p>\n
Mertens didn’t face a break point and converted four of her seven break points to pick up her first win in three tries against Andreescu, who was playing in the main draw as a wild card.<\/p>\n
Shapovalov, from Richmond Hill, Ont., lost 6-7 (5), 6-4, 7-5 to Croatian veteran Marin Cilic.<\/p>\n
Cilic improved to 4-3 against Shapovalov in a match where both players struggled to hold serve. Shapovalov was broken by Cilic seven times on 10 chances, while the Croatian conceded five breaks on seven chances.<\/p>\n
The grass-court season, the shortest on the tennis calendar at roughly a month, is capped by Wimbledon. The third Grand Slam of the season begins June 29 in London.\u2028<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian tennis players Bianca Andreescu and Denis Shapovalov opened their grass-court seasons with losses in first-round action at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-723620","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\/723620","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=723620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}