Qinwen Zheng moved into the next round of the WTA 1000 event in Beijing. In the round of 128, she beat Han Shi 7-6(6) 4-6 6-2. The match was a Chinese derby on the Beijing tournament’s hard courts with a prize fund of $9.4 million. Both players were unseeded. According to rank.tennis, Zheng is ranked 55th in the world with 1028 points, while Han Shi is 212th with 355 points.
Tie-break, response and a confident finish
The first set was tightly contested and went to a tie-break. Han Shi won six points in it, but the set went to Zheng. In the second set, Han Shi levelled the match by taking it 6-4. The deciding set was the shortest in the match: Zheng took it 6-2 and closed out the contest in two sets to one.
Han Shi came into this match with two wins in Beijing. She beat Mihalíková 6-0 6-2 and Kalieva 6-7(5) 7-5 6-3. Before that, she reached the quarterfinals in Ankara, where she lost to Berfu Cengiz 3-6 4-6. Zheng’s last tournament before Beijing was the US Open. There she beat Putintseva, Madison Keys and Iga Świątek 7-5 6-3, and in the quarterfinals she lost to Elena Rybakina 6-3 1-6 4-6.
According to api.tennis, the head-to-head between the two players is now 1:0 in favor of Qinwen Zheng.