On the men’s side, second-seeded Andy Murray will face Spain’s Marcel Granollers at 1 p.m. ET, and he should be able to advance as well.
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Williams is no stranger to victory at Flushing Meadows.
Australian Bernard Tomic, who opted to play in a tournament in Mexico City rather than represent his country at the recent Olympic Games following a row with Chef de Mission Kitty Chiller, was again involved in controversy as he was beaten by Damir Dzumhur of Bosnia.
The top-ranked athlete began her bid for a record-breaking 23rd major title in the USA open this week. She was stopped in last year’s semifinals while going for the calendar-year grand slam and appears to have a comfortable run in the first week of the tournament.
“We use our ears when we play”.
This is the 20th U.S. Open since her first match at Arthur Ashe Stadium and 18th appearance at age 36. Williams did, however, smack one backhand return victor in the final game.
As expected, Williams had a big win in the first round defeating Ekaterina Makarova 6-3, 6-3.
Another win when she takes on Swede Johanna Larsson in the third round and Williams will equal the all-time number of wins at the majors.
And when the drops came down early in Murray’s second set, well, it was loud as can be.
The night session on Day 4 of the US Open has a distinctly American flavour about it and it kicks off with first seed Serena Williams taking on world No.87 Vania King.
In other women’s matches, 17th-seeded Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russian Federation needed 3 hours, 2 minutes to get past Kristina Mladenovic of France, equaling the fifth-longest US Open women’s singles match on record.
“Once I got through that, I settled down and played I think a really good match”, he said.
“I definitely want to keep it as good as it can be”. That’s something that I worked on a lot. “When I serve well, the rest of my game tends to follow”.
World No. 1 and defending champion Novak Djokovic reached the third round of the US Open without swinging his racket Wednesday when scheduled opponent Jiri Vesely pulled out injured. The German is through to the US Open third round without dropping a set. The Czech could not play as a result of a left forearm inflammation.
Canadian Milos Raonic is matched against American Ryan Harrison, while in the women’s competition, Wimbledon and Rio finalist Angelique Kerber will play Croatian Mirjana Lucic-Baroni. However, Lucic-Baroni stiffened the rest of the way and made her opponent fight hard to advance in straight sets.
The 19-year-old qualifier won 4-6, 7-5, 6-4, 6-0 in the first round of the U.S. Open on Tuesday for his first victory at a major.
Kei Nishikori, who became Asia’s first men’s Grand Slam finalist in NY in 2014, when he fell to Marin Cilic in the final, also advanced, downing German Benjamin Becker 6-1, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3.
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Sixth-seeded Kei Nishikori and No. 8 Dominic Thiem were among the players who had their matches halted Thursday.
