A relieved Iga Swiatek cried on court after she began her Wimbledon title defence with a stuttering three-set victory over Taylor Townsend.<\/p>\n
The Pole evoked memories of her crushing 6-0 6-0 final victory over Amanda Anisimova 12 months ago as she dropped just one game in the opening set.<\/p>\n
However, the third seed had to fight through her own frustration and an increased level from her American opponent to win 6-1 2-6 6-3 in just over two hours.<\/p>\n
After letting out a roar of celebration, Swiatek became tearful and hid her face in her towel as she took a few moments to collect herself.<\/p>\n
Her father and sister, sitting on the front row of the Royal Box, then joined in the ovation as she walked over to carry out her post-match interview.<\/p>\n
“I’m not sure if I’m able to talk that much – it was a tough couple of weeks. Not a season where everything went how I wanted,” the 25-year-old said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I won any three-set matches this year, so I’m happy I could do it here.”<\/p>\n
Swiatek later said the “whole process” of opening play on Centre Court as the defending champion had been “really emotional”.<\/p>\n
“Last year probably the most amazing thing in my tennis career happened here,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I felt it also today. But it was a mix of different emotions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A relieved Iga Swiatek cried on court after she began her Wimbledon title defence with a stuttering three-set…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-666507","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\/666507","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=666507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}