\u201cIt means the world to me that I can win this match in front of you (the crowd) and have your support,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt really good on the grass today and you also had your part for making this happen for me. Thank you so much and I can\u2019t wait to see you in the next round.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a really good start. In practice, it went better than the last few years. For me, it\u2019s never been easy to move on the grass because I had a big surgery on my knee so I\u2019m a bit scared.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis year I feel more confident and I\u2019m trying to enjoy it more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristian and Zheng were made to wait for hours as the London weather conditions put a five-hour delay on the proceedings for the Andy Murray Arena.<\/p>\n
When the covers came off \u2013 much to the delight of the crowd \u2013 the two got set to battle it out in testing conditions in the first match on the grass.<\/p>\n
In a fifth meeting between the pair, last year\u2019s semi-finalist Zheng got out to a 2-0 lead before losing the following four games.<\/p>\n
The two tussled for momentum throughout the match but the Romanian managed to stave off a break point at 4-3 before going on to serve out the set.<\/p>\n
Zheng missed a large chunk of the end of last season and didn\u2019t return to the tour until February this year. She showed promising signs for the rest of her grass court season in the second set, where she didn\u2019t face a single break point.<\/p>\n
However, Cristian had the edge in the final tie-break. The Romanian got a crucial mini-break at 4-3 and then serving on her first match point, Zheng blasted the return long to complete a hard-fought victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt means the world to me that I can win this match in front of you (the crowd)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-629418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629418","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=629418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}