Williams won six of her Grand Slam singles titles – plus 30 WTA tournaments – before Austria’s Tagger was born in February 2008.<\/p>\n
Tagger’s coach Francesca Schiavone – the Italian former world number four who won the 2010 French Open – is the same age as Williams, and lost all eight meetings with the American during her playing career.<\/p>\n
“When I saw the draw I was super excited and a bit nervous – I respect her a lot,” said Tagger, who is 53rd in the world.<\/p>\n
“It is funny she used to play with my coach. I would love to play at this age – I want to congratulate her.”<\/p>\n
While the straight-set scoreline will embolden the critics, Williams did make Tagger – a rising talent who is predicted to have a bright future at the very top – work hard.<\/p>\n
However, the teenager proved far too good. The 2025 French Open girls’ champion was superb on serve – dropping just seven service points and not facing a break point – while handling Williams’ pace and crushing groundstrokes off both wings.<\/p>\n
Tagger broke her illustrious opponent’s serve twice – for 1-0 and 5-2 leads – in two almost identical sets.<\/p>\n
At times, Williams was able to use her powerful serve to get out of trouble – fighting off 12 of 16 break points – and the veteran’s trademark competitive spirit never wavered.<\/p>\n
But it was another example of how far behind the rest of the tour she now is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Williams won six of her Grand Slam singles titles – plus 30 WTA tournaments – before Austria’s Tagger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-815577","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\/815577","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=815577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}