Gabriela Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe had reason to be nervous entering the first match of their title defense at the WTA Finals Riyadh presented by PIF.<\/p>\n
After all, in two other matches against Mirra Andreeva and Diana Shnaider this season, they were winless.\u00a0<\/p>\n
WTA Finals:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n But they weren’t about to let that trend continue in their happy place.\u00a0<\/p>\n In their return to Riyadh, Dabrowski and Routliffe opened the Liezel Huber Group with a 6-3, 7-6(2) win in 1 hour and 23 minutes — running their record in Riyadh to a perfect 6-0.<\/p>\n After leading wire-to-wire in the first set, the third seeds came from a break down in the second set as Andreeva and Shnaider settled in in their WTA Finals debut. Down 5-3, Dabrowski and Routliffe won three straight games, and dominated the eventual tiebreak.<\/p>\n “They’re a really tough match-up for us — their lobs are amazing, their defense is amazing, you have to put away so many balls; it feels like the point never ends,” Routliffe said afterwards. “I think we did a good job in the big moments of putting away the ball and staying aggressive.”<\/p>\n Dabrowski also credited clutch play for the pair’s turnaround. After neither side faced a deciding deuce point on serve in the first set, Dabrowski and Routliffe won three of the four games that featured one in the second set.<\/p>\n “I thought we really stuck with it in the second set, which was awesome,” she said. “I thought our energy was good and it helped us get through some tight points, some deuce points — they’re never easy with the scoring format — so I’m really proud of us.”<\/p>\n More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gabriela Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe had reason to be nervous entering the first match of their title defense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":{"0":"post-267624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267624","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=267624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}