Rising Croatian Antonia Ruzic continued her strong start to 2026 with a 6-4, 7-5 upset over former World No. 4 Zheng Qinwen at the BNP Paribas Open on Saturday — surging into the third round in her tournament debut.<\/p>\n
Indian Wells:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n The 23-year-old Ruzic edged Zheng in 1 hour and 54 minutes by playing her best when it mattered. Both players had nine break-point chances in the contest, but Ruzic won four to Zheng’s two. She erased an early break deficit at 3-2 to win the first set, and in the second, regrouped after Zheng won three straight games to knot the score from 5-2 behind.<\/p>\n The win for Ruzic against the 2024 Olympic champion is her eighth career Top 20 win — a total that’s doubled since January. Up next for her is another such player in the form of No. 13 seed and Doha champion Karolina Muchova.<\/p>\n But Ruzic wasn’t the only unseeded player to make a splash against a seed on Saturday. American Ashlyn Krueger and Brit Sonay Kartal also scored upset wins, against No. 19 seed Liudmila Samsonova and No. 20 seed Emma Navarro, respectively.<\/p>\n The 21-year-old, a recent semifinalist in Austin, made it consecutive tournaments at which she’s won at least two matches by coming from a 6-3, 5-3 deficit to beat Samsonova 3-6, 7-5, 6-2. The World No. 82 hammered 11 aces against Samsonova, and won six straight games en route to taking a lead she’d never relinquish in the decider.<\/p>\n Prior to her final-four effort in Texas, Krueger hadn’t won back-to-back matches since last year’s Miami Open. Samsonova, meanwhile, has now lost six straight three-set matches this year.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, former Top 10 player Navarro dropped to 4-8 this year after losing to Kartal 6-1, 3-6, 7-6(2), in 2 hours and 34 minutes. Navarro twice served for the win in the final set, at 5-4 and 6-5, and buried a forehand into the net on match point in the 12th game. Two points later, she dropped serve, and lost five straight points after opening the deciding tiebreak with a mini-break.<\/p>\n Kartal, who reached the fourth round in Tennis Paradise 12 months ago in her tournament debut, will face another American — No. 15 seed Madison Keys — next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rising Croatian Antonia Ruzic continued her strong start to 2026 with a 6-4, 7-5 upset over former World…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":["post-511061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511061","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=511061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}