MADRID: Former world number one Victoria Azarenka won her first match on clay in two years in the first round of the Madrid Open on Sunday as she prepares to compete in the French Open for the first time since 2016.

The Belarusian, who missed a large part of last season due to a custody battle over her son, kicked off her Madrid Open campaign with a 6-3, 6-3 victory over Serbian Aleksandra Krunic in the first round.

Azarenka will be joined in the second round by world number one and defending champion Simona Halep, Spaniard Garbine Muguruza and world number two Caroline Wozniacki, all of whom comfortably won their opening round encounters.

Halep crushed Ekaterina Makarova 6-1, 6-0, for a 13th straight victory in the tournament.

Halep has been having fitness issues with her legs and lost to CoCo Vandeweghe in the second round on the Stuttgart clay last week.

Second-seeded Wozniacki was almost as dominant in her 6-3, 6-1 win over Australian Daria Gavrilova. The Australian Open champion is playing a week after she withdrew from the Istanbul Cup due to an abdominal injury.

Third-seeded Muguruza, the 2016 French Open winner and reigning Wimbledon champion, ousted China’s Peng Shuai with a 6-4, 6-2, hitting five aces and breaking Peng’s serve four times, and will be aiming to progress past the second round of her home tournament for the first time.

Maria Sharapova beat Mihaela Buzarnescu 6-4, 6-1 for her first clay-court victory of the season. A left arm injury had forced Sharapova to withdraw from both the Dubai Championship and Miami Open.

World number 10 Petra Kvitova, who won in Madrid in 2011 and 2015 and also won the Prague Open on Saturday, brushed aside Ukrainian Lesia Tsurenko 6-1, 6-2, and Sloane Stephens beat Silvia Soler-Espinosa 6-3, 6-2.

Japan’s Naomi Osaka continued her underwhelming record on outdoor clay as she lost to China’s Zhang Shuai.

Other winners included Samantha Stosur, Sorana Cirstea and Carla Suarez Navarro.

There was a mild upset in the men’s tournament, where unseeded Frenchman Richard Gasquet knocked out Czech 14th seed Tomas Berdych 6-4, 6-2.

Canadian Denis Shapovalov joined Gasquet in the second round after seeing off American Tennys Sandgren 6-1, 6-4.

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2018