During the 25-minute women’s draw ceremony at the All England Club, the wait for the appearance of one name – and its placing – brought a sense of anticipation like none of the other 127.<\/p>\n
Williams popped up midway through the draw, in an intriguing section which also features Swiatek.<\/p>\n
Ever since 23-time singles Grand Slam champion Williams finally confirmed she was going to return to singles action, there was deep intrigue about what sort of challenge she would face.<\/p>\n
As a wildcard entry, Williams could have been drawn against one of the world’s leading players – such as top seed Aryna Sabalenka or Swiatek – or a lower-ranked player outside of the top 100 who had to fight their way through qualifying.<\/p>\n
Facing 20-year-old Joint is a match which looks eminently winnable.<\/p>\n
Joint lost in the first round on her Wimbledon main-draw debut last year and has won just one of her past 14 matches.<\/p>\n
Williams is used to being the centre of attention wherever she goes and it will be no exception when she returns on Tuesday – presumably on Centre Court.<\/p>\n
If Williams comes through that match she could face 29th seed Alexandra Eala of the Philippines next, with the possibility of playing Swiatek in the third round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the 25-minute women’s draw ceremony at the All England Club, the wait for the appearance of one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-727063","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\/727063","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=727063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}