Ash Barty has progressed to the third round of the Italian Open in Rome with a 6-4 6-1 victory over Kazakhstan’s Yaroslava Shvedova.
The final scoreline did not tell the full story of the second-round encounter as the world No.665 took the fight to the Australian throughout.
Playing in her first match since a three-set loss to Aryna Sabalenka in Sunday’s Madrid Open final, Barty surrendered her opening service game to Shvedova.
The world No.1 was taken to deuce in the fifth game of the opening set before holding serve as her 33-year-old opponent continued to play well above her ranking.
But despite being well below her best, Barty made her move with a run of four straight games to take the opening set in 46 minutes.
Shvedova continued to show tremendous fight, earning a break point in Barty’s opening service game of the second set.
The Australian held serve and rode her luck to break Shvedova and take a 2-0 advantage courtesy of a fortunate net cord and a backhand error from her opponent.
But Barty continued to battle her own game, producing a wild forehand error to go down a break and a double-fault to lose her next service game.
The popular Aussie broke back immediately and produced the shot of the match in the sixth game when she sowed tremendous speed running back towards the baseline and produced a pin-point lob for a winner.
Barty sealed the victory with her fifth break of the match to book a third-round meeting with Russian world No.28 Veronika Kudermetova, who defeated Caroline Garcia of France in straight sets on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Serena Williams and world No.2 Naomi Osaka both crashed out of the tournament with second-round losses.
Nadia Podoroska of Argentina sent Williams packing with a 7-6 (8-6) 7-5 victory in what was the legendary American’s first match since February.
Osaka’s struggles on the red dirt continued with a 7-6 (7-2) 6-2 loss to American world No.31 Jessica Pegula.
