Jones broke serve early in her match and was 3-0 up after just 11 minutes at a windy stadium 17.<\/p>\n
However, the 24-year-old had to battle to save seven break points before the end of the set as Gorgodze fought back from a poor start.<\/p>\n
The Georgian cut a frustrated figure during the opening set – at one point she turned on spectators behind her who were asked by the umpire to switch off their mobile phones – but then began the second set with a break and raced into a 3-0 lead.<\/p>\n
At times Jones struggled to cope with the 33-year-old’s powerful forehand, but the Briton broke for a third time to get the set back on serve.<\/p>\n
Jones – the top seed in women’s qualifying – had to save four set points in a brutal tie-break before claiming victory with her fifth match point.<\/p>\n
“If I could swear, I would!” Jones told Sky Sports after the match.<\/p>\n
“It was really difficult, she [Gorgodze] makes you play a lot of balls. She played some really good tennis in the second set, but I just didn’t want to be out here in a third set today.”<\/p>\n
Victory over Arianne Hartono in the third round of qualifying on Friday would secure Jones – who grew up playing on clay – a place in the main draw for the first time in her career.<\/p>\n
She has never received direct entry to a Grand Slam through her ranking and narrowly missed out this time, despite having climbed to a career-high 86th in the world since the US Open cut-off point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jones broke serve early in her match and was 3-0 up after just 11 minutes at a windy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-101739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}