Polish tennis player Katarzyna Kawa, ranked 126th in the world and the fifth seed in qualifying, opened her Beijing campaign with a win. In the first round of qualifying she defeated Japan's Rinko Matsuda, ranked 431st and unseeded, by a score of 7-6(6) 2-6 6-3. The Beijing tournament is a WTA 1000 event played on hard courts with a prize fund of $9.4 million.
The match turned out to be much closer than the gap of more than three hundred ranking places would suggest. The first set went all the way to a tiebreak, which Kawa took 7-6(6). In the second set the initiative shifted to Matsuda, who leveled the match with a confident 6-2. The decisive set went the way of Kawa, 6-3.
Three sets after three losses
For Kawa, this victory snapped a rough patch of results. In her three previous matches she had lost: at the US Open she fell to Ekaterine Gorgodze 6-3 6-7(7) 2-6, in Antalya she lost in the first round to Eva Bennemann 2-6 5-7, and in Valencia she was eliminated in the opening round by Maria Garcia Sid 3-6 3-6.
Before Beijing, Matsuda had been playing in Nanao, where she beat Ikumi Yamazaki 6-2 6-3 in the second round before losing in the next round to Sakura Hosogi 7-5 3-6 5-7. Earlier still, in Changsha, the Japanese player lost in the first round to Sohyun Park 0-6 3-6. The Beijing meeting marked the only encounter between Kawa and Matsuda in their head-to-head history. Match statistics provided by api.tennis.