World number 34 Nikola Bartunkova stunned her Czech compatriot Karolina Muchova 6-3, 6-0 at the China Open on Thursday to breeze into the semi-finals.<\/p>\n
The 20-year-old sealed the win in just 66 minutes<\/a> and will play either Mirra Andreeva<\/a> or Ekaterina Alexandrova<\/a> in the next round.<\/p>\n Bartunkova<\/a> won five consecutive games in 19 minutes in the first set as her seventh-seeded opponent struggled to respond.<\/p>\n Muchova<\/a> saved five set points, but it was not enough to hold back Bartunkova, who had already ousted second-seeded Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> from the tournament in Beijing.<\/p>\n She raced into another five-game lead in the second set and gave Muchova no chance of a reprieve, forcing her into firing long to seal a win she described as a “dream come true”.<\/p>\n “Honestly, I don’t know. It was (an) unbelievable match,” Bartunkova said on court.<\/p>\n “She’s a great player and also a great human being.<\/p>\n “It was a really tough match today, but I was just trying to put my best tennis, and I did it.”<\/p>\n Andreeva and Alexandrova were due to play each other later on Thursday in an all-Russian affair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number 34 Nikola Bartunkova stunned her Czech compatriot Karolina Muchova 6-3, 6-0 at the China Open on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-796496","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\/796496","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=796496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}