Shapovalov rallies for win, while Serena withdraws
MIAMI—Richmond Hill native Denis Shapovalov advanced to the third round of the Miami Open, Serena Williams made a sudden exit, and top women's seed Naomi Osaka tumbled out of the tournament.
Williams blamed a previously undisclosed left knee injury for her withdrawal. She had showed no signs of injury while winning her opening match a day earlier against Rebecca Pe-terson, 6-3,1-4 6-L Williams, 37, has played only eight matches this year. She hasn't won a tournament since the 2017 Australian Open, be-fore she took a break of more than a year to become a mom.
"I am disappointed to with-draw," Williams said in a state-ment "It was an amazing expe-rience to play at Hard Rock Sta-dium this year, and I would like to thank the Miami Open for putting on an amazing event I hope to be back next year to play at this one-of-a-kind tour-nament in front of the incred-ible fans here in Miami."
Osaka lost in the third round to tour veteran Hsieh Su-Wei of Taiwan, 4-4 7-6 (4), 6-3. Her departure matched the earliest in the tournament by a top-seeded woman and jeopardized her No.1 ranking, depending on results next week.
Shapovalov, meanwhile, had to rally from a set down to de-feat Britain's Daniel Evans 4-6, 6-1, 6-3 in his second-round match. The No. 20 seed had a 37-19 edge in winners.
Shapovalov will play Andrey Rublev in the third round after the Russian qualifier downed Marin Cilic of Croatia 6-4, 6-4. Shapovalov also advanced to the second round of doubles when he and partner Rohan Bopanna beat American Austin Krajicek and New Zealand's Ar-tern Sitak 7-5, 2-6,10-6 In third-round women's sin-gles, Mississauga's Bianca An-dreescu was scheduled to play eighth-seeded German Ange-lique Kerber on Saturday night on Hard Rock Stadium's show-case court.
The 18-year-old Canadian was victorious in three sets when they played last Sunday in the BNP Paribas Open final at Indi-an Wells.
Andreescu entered the match with a30-3 record in WTA Tour play this season. She has rocket-ed to No. 24 in the world rank-ings.
The fifth-seeded women's doubles team of Ottawa's Ga-briela Dabrowski and China's Yifan Xu moved on to the round of 16, beating Slovenia's Dalila Jakupovic and Russia's Irina Khromacheva 6-2, 6-3.
Canada's Milos Raonic and Felix Auger-Aliassime had the day off.