By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Sunday March 24, 2024
Iga Swiatek rallied from a set down to keep her winning streak -- and hopes of winning the Sunshine Double -- alive in Miami.
Photo Source: Getty
It wasn’t pretty. It didn’t have to be.
As Iga Swiatek matures, she becomes better in the trusted art of problem solving, and that showed on Sunday night in Miami as the World No.1 overcame a difficult outing to eventually edge past Linda Noskova, 6-7(7), 6-4, 6-4.
In the third third-round tilt between the two players in three months, Swiatek has now won twice consecutively. She lost the first, a 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 decision, and has since responded with back-to-back wins over the talented 19-year-old at Indian Wells (6-4, 6-0) and Miami.
Now 22-2 on the season, the Pole will face Russia’s Ekaterina Alexandrova in the round of 16 at Miami, where she is the 2022 champion.
Swiatek was in charge early, leading 5-2 in the first, but lost five of the next six games and failed to convert a set point in the tiebreak (at 6-5), before losing the opener.
She rebounded well in the second, jumping out to a 5-1 lead, but Noskova reeled her back in, closing to 5-4 with a break point to level at 5-all, before Swiatek closed out the set.
Swiatek broke for 3-2 in the final set, and escaped trouble as she served for the match by rallying from 0-40. She won the final five points to close out the victory in two hours and 43 minutes.
"For sure it wasn't like the match went one way from the beginning till the end," Swiatek said of her victory. "I know that I could stay more consistent with my level. Sometimes we have matches like that and we need to figure out how to close them anyway. I'm happy that I'm through to the next round."
Asked about how she got out of trouble in the final game, Swiatek said her coaching box helped keep her focused.
"I got pretty good coaching from my box because I wasn't sure what to really focus on," she said. "Now it's obvious for me. At that moment it didn't seem like that. I probably served a little bit too slow, so I tried to change that in next points."
Swiatek is bidding to become the second woman in history – and the fourth player overall – to win multiple Sunshine Doubles. Steffi Graf is the only woman to achieve the feat – Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are the only men
The women completed their third round matches on Sunday in Miami, Monday will see all eight round of 16 matches contested.
Fourteen seeds are through to R16 at Miami, the most since 2013 (only Yulia Putintseva and Danielle Collins are unseeded).