Supervisors do generally take earlier dangerous blood into consideration after they allocate officers, however it’s not a superb search for the game.
At across the identical time that Pliskova was boiling over on the Pietrangeli Stadium, there was a way of payback within the air on Courtroom 3 as British No 1 Johanna Konta dismantled Su Wei-Hsieh – the lady who had wrecked her French Open 12 months in the past – in simply 65 minutes.
Ultimately 12 months’s Roland Garros, Hsieh – who hails from Chinese language Taipei – belied a rating of No 109 to ship one among Konta’s most disappointing defeats. At present’s rematch promised to be one other banana pores and skin, notably as circumstances right here in Rome are nearly an identical to these in Paris.
However any considerations proved misplaced, as Konta took benefit of her opponent’s sluggishness to seize a first-set bagel. Hsieh did look extra threatening thereafter, particularly when saving 4 match factors in a tense remaining jiffy. However Konta closed her 6-0, 6-4 win with a punchy forehand volley.
Her reward is a crack at Jelena Ostapenko, the reigning French Open champion, in tomorrow’s third spherical.
Later, in a cross-Channel battle between the British and French No 1s, Kyle Edmund eradicated Lucas Pouille in dominant fashion. Edmund solely confronted a single break level in the middle of his 6-2, 7-6 victory, which he saved. He completed off the win with a sometimes pulverising forehand winner.
