If Madison Keys was not nervous enough about starting her Australian Open title defence, facing an unknown opponent only added to the tension.<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old American had a fairytale run in Melbourne 12 months ago, culminating in her lifting the first Grand Slam trophy of her career.<\/p>\n
However, she made an edgy start to her title defence on Tuesday, losing the first four games to Grand Slam debutant Oleksandra Oliynykova.<\/p>\n
Keys said afterwards she had struggled to find footage of her opponent to help her prepare, with Oliynykova’s defensive play style not matching up well with her big-hitting game.<\/p>\n
But the ninth seed eventually settled down to clinch a 7-6 (8-6) 6-1 victory over the Ukrainian.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been thinking about this moment for basically a year,” said Keys.<\/p>\n
“The moment they say, ‘Ready, play’, it all hits you in a way that I don’t think you can ever really explain.<\/p>\n
“As nerve-racking and stressful as that can be, I’m still reminding myself of just how few people get to be in that moment.<\/p>\n
“Being able to walk out today and have the crowd be as welcoming as they were, I’ll take the stress any day.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Madison Keys was not nervous enough about starting her Australian Open title defence, facing an unknown opponent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-253963","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}