Raducanu had looked far from her best in her past two matches following illness but, 16 days after her first-round exit at Roland Garros, the Briton made afresh on Andy Murray Arena.<\/p>\n
The 2021 US Open champion held a commanding 3-0 lead before rain halted play – but that would not disrupt her rhythm.<\/p>\n
She captured the first set without reply after just 20 minutes on court, winning 25 of the 31 points played – hitting 11 winners and just two unforced errors.<\/p>\n
Raducanu maintained that excellent level to begin the second set with a break of serve – although she would not have it entirely her own way.<\/p>\n
A Queen’s quarter-finalist last year, Raducanu was hampered by double-faults as she allowed Blinkova back in – with four successive breaks of serve tying the set at three games apiece.<\/p>\n
However, Raducanu broke again, courtesy of a fortuitous net cord, to set up the chance to serve out the match, and she wore a beaming smile in the sunshine as a closing backhand winner down the line on her second match point was met by huge cheers.<\/p>\n
Writing ‘back home’ with a heart on a TV camera lens before exiting the court, Raducanu will return to face either Romanian Sorana Cirstea or Australia’s Maddison Inglis in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Raducanu had looked far from her best in her past two matches following illness but, 16 days after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-693717","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\/693717","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=693717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}