{"id":48593,"date":"2025-05-15T15:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T12:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=48593"},"modified":"2025-05-15T15:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T12:16:10","slug":"zheng-says-too-much-respect-for-sabalenka-hampered-her-in-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/15\/zheng-says-too-much-respect-for-sabalenka-hampered-her-in-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Zheng Says Too Much Respect for Sabalenka Hampered her in the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Zheng Qinwen finally got her first win over Aryna Sabalenka at the seventh attempt to reach the Italian Open semi-finals on Wednesday and the Olympic champion said she had perhaps shown the world number one too much respect in their prior meetings.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese 22-year-old had gone down tamely in all but one of her previous six encounters with Sabalenka, including in the 2024 Australian Open final, but she delivered a clinical 6-4 6-3 win over the off-color Belarusian in Rome.<\/p>\n<p>The win will come as a huge boost for Zheng as she continues her preparations for the French Open, which begins on May 25.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The few times I faced her in the beginning, I gave her too much respect,&#8221; Zheng told reporters, according to Reuters.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t face her like a normal player. I remember I was going to see her in the 2017 China Open &#8230; My father was saying &#8216;Oh, you need to learn about her forehand, her backhand&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think this kind of respect, it takes a while to treat her like a normal player.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zheng Qinwen finally got her first win over Aryna Sabalenka at the seventh attempt to reach the Italian Open semi-finals on Wednesday and the Olympic champion said she had perhaps shown the world number one too much respect in their prior meetings. The Chinese 22-year-old had gone down tamely in all but one of her &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48593","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\/48593","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=48593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48594,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48593\/revisions\/48594"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}