The Russian led 2-0 in both sets and 5-4 in the first before Zheng defended three set points and won the remaining 11 points to win the opener 7-5.<\/p>\n
Andreeva continued to make mistakes in a second set that was finely poised at 4-4 before Zheng took control.<\/p>\n
The crowd was passionate, although disruptive at times between points, and a late double fault from Zheng in the final exchanges briefly threatened to derail a special occasion for Chinese tennis.<\/p>\n
But there was to be no late collapse and Zheng sealed the win with an ace.<\/p>\n
“I felt like I just forgot how to compete after coming back from injury,” she told reporters.<\/p>\n
“Finally, after so many losses, I [found] my fire again,” she said.<\/p>\n
The win is her 14th win over a top-10 opponent and her third this season.<\/p>\n
Despite the loss, Andreeva is expected to rise to number three in the world when the rankings are updated on Monday.<\/p>\n
Zheng is set to leap up 31 spots to number 23 and will compete at Wuhan Open on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“I’m so hungry, honestly, for what’s going to come next,” Zheng said. <\/p>\n
“I just want to give everything.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Russian led 2-0 in both sets and 5-4 in the first before Zheng defended three set points…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":929325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-929324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929324","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=929324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/929325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}