No. 19 seed Elise Mertens eased past Alexandra Eala in straight sets to advance to the third round of the Mutua Madrid Open on Friday. She will next face former World No. 1 Karolina Pliskova for a place in the round of 16.<\/p>\n
Playing Eala for the second time on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, Mertens opened the match by breaking serve in Eala\u2019s first service game. She added another break in the seventh game and then held serve to take the opening set.<\/p>\n
Mertens, a quarterfinalist here in 2021, broke Eala twice to start the second set and added a third break in the seventh game to seal a 6-2, 6-1 victory in 1 hour, 16 minutes. She saved the only break point she faced and converted five of 11 break-point chances.<\/p>\n
With the win, Mertens improved to 2-0 in the head-to-head series against the 20-year-old Eala and also improved to 13-7 in singles this season.<\/p>\n
Pliskova holds off late challenge from Sakkari<\/p>\n
Pliskova entered her match against the No. 33 seeded Maria Sakkari with a 4-3 lead in their head-to-head series. She won the first set with the only break of serve in the sixth game.<\/p>\n
The Czech player moved ahead by a break for a 4-2 lead in the second set before Sakkari rallied to level it. Eventually, Pliskova edged the tiebreak 8-6 to complete a 6-4, 7-6 (8) win in 1 hour, 31 minutes.<\/p>\n
Pliskova, playing in Madrid for the first time since 2022, has reached the semifinals here once, back in 2018. She improved to 8-4 this season with this win.<\/p>\n
The third-round clash between Pliskova and Mertens will be their eighth career meeting, first since 2023, with the Czech holding a 4-3 edge in their head-to-head series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 19 seed Elise Mertens eased past Alexandra Eala in straight sets to advance to the third round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,1602,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-548359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}