Serena was playing her first match since Wimbledon, while Venus has played singles and doubles at three hard-court events in recent weeks.<\/p>\n
The pair made a poor start against Ukraine’s Kostyuk and American Stearns before shaking off what Serena called “a little rust” in the second set.<\/p>\n
They quickly went down 6-0 in the deciding 10-point tie-break but fought back impressively.<\/p>\n
Serena produced two service winners to force the tie-break back on serve, but Kostyuk and Stearns held firm before securing victory on a double fault from Venus.<\/p>\n
“I thought it was fun, it was special, it was good,” Serena said.<\/p>\n
“We were starting to feel it. It was really cool to be able to do this again.”<\/p>\n
The sisters would need wildcards to play either singles or doubles at the US Open, which begins on Sunday, 30 August.<\/p>\n
Serena – who described her knee injury as “a little traumatic experience, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – has only played one singles match since her return.<\/p>\n
Venus has lost her past 13 singles matches but has had more success in the doubles, reaching the quarter-finals of the women’s tournament in New York last year.<\/p>\n
At their peak, they won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together and three Olympic gold medals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Serena was playing her first match since Wimbledon, while Venus has played singles and doubles at three hard-court…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":741608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-741863","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\/741863","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=741863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}