Britain’s Francesca Jones missed two match points in a narrow defeat by Talia Gibson in the Nottingham Open first round.<\/p>\n
Jones battled back from a set and a break down – and a medical timeout – to force a deciding set against Australia’s Gibson.<\/p>\n
After being an early break down in the third, Jones hit back and held two match points as she served for victory at 5-3.<\/p>\n
However, world number 66 Gibson broke back and held firm in the resulting tie-break to win 6-3 5-7 7-6 (7-4) after a gruelling three hours and six minutes.<\/p>\n
Jones showed good fight in what was the longest match of her career, hitting 15 aces and landing 75% of her first serves.<\/p>\n
She also twice appeared in discomfort, particularly after being broken to start the second set when she sat with her head under a towel, breathing deeply.<\/p>\n
The doctor was called to court to check her blood pressure and vitals and Jones continued, breaking Gibson back before eventually taking a tight second set.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old took another medical timeout at 5-5 in the third set after appearing to struggle with a nasal problem.<\/p>\n
Earlier at Nottingham, Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen battled back to beat Maria Sakkari 4-6 7-6 (7-1) 6-4.<\/p>\n
Queen’s finalist Emma Raducanu and Katie Boulter both withdrew from the tournament on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Francesca Jones missed two match points in a narrow defeat by Talia Gibson in the Nottingham Open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-706302","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\/706302","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=706302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}