Tuesday 28 February 2012

Jankovic saves match points in Malaysia

Jelena Jankovic
Jelena Jankovic saved three match points as she survived a nail-biter to progress to the second round of the Malaysian Open in Kuala Lumpur.  Jankovic beat Caroline Garcia, 7-6 4-6 7-6, who struggled to close out the Serb and must work on her mental game if she is to transform her game to the main WTA tour.  It was a typically fighting performance from Jankovic, who celebrated her birthday today and will next play American veteran, Jill Craybas.  In other matches, Jarmila Gajdosova and Peng Shuai were both taken to three sets but won through in the end.  Gajdosova recovered from a first set blow-out to beat Kathrin Woerle, 1-6 7-6 7-5, meanwhile Peng lost the middle set to Yvonne Meusburger, but finished strongly with a 6-1 4-6 6-2 win.  The only seed to fall today was Anne Keothavong who lost to the qualifier Su-Wei Hsieh, who continued her rich vein of form having reached the semi-finals of Pattaya City several weeks ago.  You can see my rather disastrous set of predictions (for the top half at least!) for Kuala Lumpur here.

At the ATP 500 event in Dubai, the top eight seeds have all progressed through to the second round.  The only seed to be pushed to three sets was Andy Murray who was particularly rusty in his first match since the Australian Open as he beat Michael Berrer, 6-3 4-6 6-4.  Roger Federer picked up where he left off after his title run in Rotterdam as he lost just 7 points in a dominant first set bagel over Michael Llodra; however he was forced to fight in the second set, which went to a tiebreak.  Juan Martin Del Potro and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga both had tough matches, but prevailed in two tight sets - Del Potro helf off a late fightback from Alexandr Dolgopolov to win 6-3 7-6 and Tsonga beat Marcos Baghdatis, 7-6 6-4.  Tomas Berdych and Janko Tipsarevic both enjoyed 6-2 6-2 victories and joined Novak Djokovic in a packed line-up for the second round.  My predictions for Dubai have been pretty good so far and you can see them here.

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