Holder Iga Swiatek crashed out of the Italian Open to American Danielle Collins after a 6-1 7-5 third-round loss on Saturday in a major upset that will cost the Pole the world number two ranking as the defense of her French Open title looms.<\/p>\n
Swiatek held a commanding 7-1 head-to-head record against Collins before the contest and yet another early defeat does not bode well for the 23-year-old, who has not won a tournament since her fourth triumph at Roland Garros last year.<\/p>\n
“I played against Iga so many times … When you play that many close matches and get this close and also play some of your best tennis and lose, I think you learn a lot,” Collins, 31, said. “I feel like I applied that today, to the match.”<\/p>\n
Five-times Grand Slam champion Swiatek went 5-0 down in the opening set before getting on the board to avoid a bagel.<\/p>\n
Collins was lethal from the baseline, mixing it up with forehand and backhand service return winners as she picked apart Swiatek’s serve in an opening set that was one-way traffic.<\/p>\n
The second was level at 4-4 as Swiatek showed flashes of brilliance, but 31-year-old 2022 Australian Open runner-up Collins showed no mercy, sealing victory in one hour and 44 minutes when a return went wide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Holder Iga Swiatek crashed out of the Italian Open to American Danielle Collins after a 6-1 7-5 third-round loss on Saturday in a major upset that will cost the Pole the world number two ranking as the defense of her French Open title looms. Swiatek held a commanding 7-1 head-to-head record against Collins before the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48231,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48228\/revisions\/48231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}