As the players took a break, Sabalenka reached for a drink, prompting the umpire to call for tape over her walkie-talkie. It soon became clear that the tape was intended to cover the label on Sabalenka’s San Pellegrino bottle.<\/p>\n
The umpire then asked Sabalenka to address the issue with the label. However, Sabalenka initially didn’t hear the request, asking, “Say it again?”.<\/p>\n
“Aryna can I just ask you to take [the label] off that bottle? Perfect, thank you, we’re good, that’s fine,” the official responded. Sabalenka complied, removing the paper and continuing to drink from the clear green bottle.<\/p>\n
DON’T MISS: <\/p>\n
Sky Sports commentator Jonathan Overend drew parallels between this unusual request and the earlier incident involving Alcaraz and his match against Luca Nardi.<\/p>\n
He exclaimed: “Oh, it’s the same thing that happened in the Alcaraz match! Can’t have unofficial water. Bizarre situation when Alcaraz was asked to do it, now Sabalenka has been asked to do it.”<\/p>\n
World No. 2 Alcaraz became frustrated when the umpire informed him he couldn’t use his Evian drinks bottles during changeovers because it was a rival brand.<\/p>\n
“It’s what we’ve been told,” Allensworth said when passing on the instructions to Alcaraz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the players took a break, Sabalenka reached for a drink, prompting the umpire to call for tape…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[652,59458,37370,99,428,9519,59457],"class_list":["post-86187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-brand-sponsorship","tag-cincinnati-open","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-tennis-section","tag-water-bottle-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86187","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=86187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}