Australian Open champion Serena Williams scrambled to a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Francesca Schiavone in New York on Friday to set up a possible fourth-round clash with elder sister Venus at the US Open tennis championships.
Serena, the eighth seed, avenged a crushing defeat by Italy’s 25th-seeded Schiavone in the second round of the WTA Tour event in Rome in May.
That was one of many disappointments for Williams in a season that started in spectacular style, when she claimed her seventh career grand-slam title at the Australian Open.
Things went downhill quickly thanks to an ankle injury that saw her withdraw from Roland Garros in Paris, and she was still nursing the injury when she made an early exit at Wimbledon.
Williams was nursing a sore left knee in the build-up to the Open, but made it through the first two rounds with relative ease.
Her victory over Schiavone was a scrappy affair, but Williams came through when it counted most.
She broke Schiavone in the seventh and ninth games to take the first set, and broke to lead 4-2 in the second.
She couldn’t consolidate that advantage, dropping her own serve in the next game when she hit a forehand long.
In the 10th game, however, Williams played three crisp points to give herself three match points, the first two of which Schiavone saved with service winners.
She couldn’t do it one more time, however, and Williams leapt on a watery second serve to claim the victory.
She was then left waiting on tenterhooks to see if her fourth-round match would be a family affair.
Venus Williams revived her grand-slam fortunes with a triumph at Wimbledon in early July, but her 10th seeding put her on course for a clash with Serena in the final 16.
For that to come about, Venus had to get past 20th-seeded Slovakian Daniela Hantuchova on Friday night.
Other matches
Top-seeded Russian Maria Sharapova moved safely into the fourth round on Friday with a 6-2, 6-4 victory over unseeded German Julia Schruff.
Sharapova, who became the first Russian woman to claim the world number-one ranking when she held it for a week before the Open, had things all her own way in the opening set, with the 87th ranked Schruff looking intimidated by the pace off her serve and perhaps by the surroundings of the cavernous Arthur Ashe Stadium court.
Sharapova broke her to love to close out the first set, but the 23-year-old German stood her ground a bit better in the second. She dealt more confidently with Sharapova’s serve, and sprinkled in a couple of drop shots that caught the Russian off-guard.
Sharapova still earned the first break of the second set to lead 4-2, and Schruff needed the assistance of a Sharapova double-fault to break back in the next game before the Russian won the final two games to take the match after 62 minutes.
In the final 16, Sharapova will meet Indian sensation Sania Mirza, who defeated France’s Marion Bartoli 7-6 (7/4), 6-4.
”It’s going to be another tough one,” she said. ”I haven’t really seen much of how she plays. I heard she’s got a big and powerful game. You just have to go out there and see how it goes.”
Lleyton Hewitt set up a third-round meeting with big-hitting American Taylor Dent, but he needed to dig deep at times on Friday to see off an unexpectedly stern challenge from Jose Acasuso.
The Argentinian, trying to adapt his clay-court game to the demands of hard-court tennis, took the third-seeded Australian to tie-breakers in the opening two sets, but lost both of them to fall 7-6 (8/6), 7-6 (7/3), 6-2.
It was a far from vintage display from the 2001 champion, who is gradually working his way back to the top of his game after injuries to his foot and ribs.
But it was a good workout for him as he grafted away diligently from the base line.
There was little to choose between the players in the opening two sets until the tie breaks, but on both occasions it was Hewitt who stepped on the accelerator to win easily.
Acasuso hung on grimly but finally ceded his serve after five deuces to fall 0-2 down in the third and the Australian, one of the best front-runners in the game, made no mistake from there on in.
Asian number one Paradorn Srichaphan made it into the third round of a grand-slam tournament for the first time this year on Friday with a 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 upset of sixth-seeded Russian Nikolay Davydenko.
The 26-year-old Thai was the beneficiary of two key errors by Davydenko, whose only two double faults of the match came at key moments in the third set.
The first let Paradorn break back to level the set at 2-2. The Thai then earned the decisive break in a marathon eighth game that went to deuce five times.
It wasn’t until after the fifth deuce that Paradorn got his chance, courtesy of the second Davydenko double fault.
He seized the opportunity and then served out the match in front of a vocal crowd of supporters in the relatively intimate confines of the Grandstand court.
Paradorn had his first chance to go up two sets in the 10th game of the second, but he couldn’t capitalise.
He saved a break point with a blistering forehand winner in the next game to lead 6-5, and then dug in to take the set with a service break in the next.
The crucial game started badly for Davydenko when he lost the first point on an umpire’s overrule. Trailing 0-30, the Russian worked out of the jam with two aces, but netted a forehand to give the Thai another set point.
Davydenko, a quarterfinalist at the Australian Open and semifinalist at Roland Garros, ended a long rally with a forehand winner to save that one, and then saved one more before giving himself a game point with a service winner.
Another forehand error gave Paradorn another peek, however, and Davydenko surrendered the set with a backhand volley into the net. — Sapa-AFP