Russian Ekaterina Alexandrova, seed No. 11, defeated Austrian wild card Lilli Tagger 6-3, 6-3 to advance to the third round of the Miami Open on Friday night.<\/p>\n
Alexandrova, ranked No. 11, was composed and clinical throughout, never allowing the young Austrian a foothold in either set. She will next face the winner of the match between American Peyton Stearns and Romanian Jaqueline Cristian, seed No. 34.<\/p>\n
Tagger\u2019s Miami wildcard run ends against a ruthless Alexandrova<\/p>\n
The defeat will sting, but Tagger\u2019s presence at Hard Rock Stadium this week has been anything but ordinary. The 18-year-old, born in February 2008, is the reigning junior French Open champion and trains at the academy of former Roland Garros winner Francesca Schiavone.<\/p>\n
She had earned her place in the second round the hard way, defeating German qualifier Ella Seidel in a gruelling three-set battle 6-7(8), 6-4, 7-5. It was her first main draw appearance at a WTA 1000 event in Miami, having already made her WTA 1000 debut at Indian Wells earlier this month, where she defeated Varvara Gracheva in the first round.<\/p>\n
Friday night was a reminder of the gap that still exists between junior pedigree and elite senior tennis, but Alexandrova needed to be at her best to close it out cleanly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian Ekaterina Alexandrova, seed No. 11, defeated Austrian wild card Lilli Tagger 6-3, 6-3 to advance to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-536093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536093","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=536093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}