Canada’s Leylah Fernandez defeated fifth-seeded Elise Mertens of Belgium 6-2, 7-6 (8) in second-round women’s singles tennis action at the Pan Pacific Open.<\/p>\n
Fernandez, of Laval, Que., went ahead 4-1 in the second set before Mertens staged her comeback effort Thursday morning in Tokyo.<\/p>\n
After dropping the next two games, Fernandez made it 5-3, but again gave up two consecutive games.<\/p>\n
In the tiebreak, Mertens won the first three points before Fernandez answered with three straight of her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A back-and-forth affair eventually led to Mertens taking an 8-7 edge but Fernandez won the last three points to seal the victory.<\/p>\n
Fernandez had three double faults and went without an ace. However, she converted four of her 11 break-point opportunities.<\/p>\n
Fernandez will next face world No. 1 Elena Rybakina, who beat the Canadian in the final of the Ningbo Open last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada’s Leylah Fernandez defeated fifth-seeded Elise Mertens of Belgium 6-2, 7-6 (8) in second-round women’s singles tennis action…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-898913","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\/898913","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=898913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}