Victoria Azarenka is top seed at a Grand Slam for the first time in her career and she almost became the first women’s top seed to exit at that stage of Roland Garros. Despite notching up an early break in the match, Azarenka went on to find herself five points away from losing to 32-year-old veteran Alberta Brianti, trailing the Italian winner of one WTA title 6-7(6) 0-4, before taking 12 of the last 14 games to win 6-7(6) 6-4 6-2. The world No.1 piled up 60 unforced errors in the encounter, sending the ball anywhere but inside the lines. Azarenka’s opponent in the second round will be world No.198 Dinah Pfizenmaier.
Seed No.30 Mona Barthel became the first seed to fall out of Roland Garros 2012 by suffering an upset to Lauren Davis, 6-1 6-1, in the first round on the second day. No.11 seed Vera Zvonareva has pulled out injured and is replaced by lucky loser Sesil Karatantcheva. (photo: © Neal Trousdale)
Victoria played badly, badly, but even worse was her attitude during the match. If it’s not your day ( which obviously wasn’t), then you just have to stop hitting lines all the time. She was pretty lucky her opponent wasn’t good enough to use all the chances. Btw, I’m pretty shocked about Barthel’s loss. What happened, wasn’t she in great form? Btw, I have to say i’m very disappointed by ”juniors” results, Robson lost to Medina 6:1,6:1 and Mladenovic to Cibulkova 6:2,6:1. Of course, they are still young, but they were playing against right now average players and they just had to win at least more games. Everyone say they’re great potentials, but when are they gonna finally show it?
I couldn’t believe it when I was catching up on the scores and saw Azarenka was a point away from 7-6 5-0!! Amazing she managed to pull the win out of the bag in the end.
I was shocked too about Barthel’s loss. I didn’t expect her to have a great tournament with Li in her section, but I expected a win today. I hear she may have been troubled by a foot injury and quite frankly, I hope she was or this was a terrible, terrible loss!