Michelle De Brito and Arantxa Rus advance to the second qualifying round of the Sony Ericsson Open
Portuguese wildcard Michelle Larcher De Brito strained past the third seed Slovak, Magdalena Rybarikova, in the opening qualifying round of the Sony Ericsson Open at Miami, Florida on Monday night. She won the contest at 2-6, 7-5,
6-0, in one hour and forty five minutes of play to advance to the second stage of the qualifying draws.
Momentum kept swinging throughout the competition as the Portuguese struggled hard to bounce back after dropping the first set. De Brito exhibited her mental steel once again to recover from an early loss in the match and reeled
off the later two sets to register her 12th victory of the running WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) season.
De Brito served with 61 percent accuracy, without belting any aces and collecting 33 of the 47 first serve points in the game. Although she coughed nine doubles faults in the contest, they didn’t cost her much as her opponent followed
her with the same number of double faults. Rybarikova fired eight rapid aces to the opponent’s court and bagged 30 out of 42 first serve points but her large number of unforced errors led her down in the contest.
De Brito was stunned by three serve breaks from the Slovak in the opener and didn’t recover from the early loss, submitting the first set to her opponent at 2-6. The Portuguese made a comeback in the hard-fought second set, breaking
the Slovak’s serve twice to seal the set at 7-5. Once in finding her spark, De Brito completely blew away Rybarikova in the decider by amazingly breaking her in every game to mark an end to the matchup in the most assertive manner at 6-0.
The Portuguese will square off against the 21st seed Dutch, Arantxa Rus in the second round of the qualifying draws. Rus routed the unseeded Japanese, Misaki Doi in straight sets 6-1, 6-2, taking barely 79 minutes of
play in the opening round.
The Dutch rarely faced a serious challenge from Doi in the whole matchup, wiping off the Japanese convincingly from the tournament. Rus crafted 13 break chances in the game and converted five of them to route her opponent, who
registered just one break point. She took the hold of the game right from the beginning, cracking two straight serve breaks to lead 5-1 serving for the set. Rus got to a 1-0 lead in the match when she closed the opener at 6-1.
Doi kept struggling even in the second set, hitting plenty of errant strokes, ending long and wide of the court. The Japanese hit a break point in the set but had to suffer three serve breaks from her Dutch opponent to surrender
the second set at 6-2. Rus needs to overcome De Brito in the second round to book a berth in the main draws of the Sony Ericsson Open.
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