Emma Raducanu fired 11 aces en route to a 6-2, 6-2 defeat of Daria Snigur at the Rothesay Open, advancing to her first Hologic WTA Tour grass-court quarterfinal in 1 hour and 19 minutes.
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The result puts the former US Open champion into her second quarterfinal of the season following Stuttgart in April, and the seventh tour-level quarterfinal of her career overall. She previously reached the last eight at the ITF W100 event in Nottingham in 2021 -- a result that earned her a main-draw wild card at Wimbledon that year.
Raducanu will await the winner of British wild card Francesca Jones or Ashlyn Krueger. Jones was serving for the match at 6-4, 4-6, 6-5, 30-30 when the match was suspended due to rain. It will resume on Friday.
The inclement weather also canceled the second-round match between top seed Ons Jabeur and Linda Fruhvirtova. The winner will face Karolina Pliskova in the quarterfinals.
Snigur had been coming off her third career Top 20 win in the opening round over No.2 seed Marta Kostyuk, and broke Raducanu first for a 2-0 lead. But the Briton responded by reeling off six straight games to assert her authority on the match, and saved all six further break points she would face in the contest.
Afterwards, she said that she had been wary of Snigur, her 2002-born peer with whom she had competed in juniors.
"It was an extremely tricky match," she said in the on-court interview. "Honestly, I knew from before came on that I needed to be on it today, because Daria is a really good grass-court player. She won junior Wimbledon and I played with her in the juniors growing up. I know how tricky she can be to play, and how unorthodox she is. It's really difficult, but I'm happy with how I managed it."
Though No.127-ranked Snigur's flat strikes were intermittently lethal off the ground -- the Ukrainian tallied 17 winners -- she was also more error-prone than Raducanu, committing 20 unforced errors to the home player's 16. Raducanu will next face either Ashlyn Krueger or fellow British wild card Francesca Jones.
Mission accomplished 🫡@EmmaRaducanu secures her spot in the quarterfinals after defeating Snigur in straight sets 6-2, 6-2. #RothesayOpen pic.twitter.com/In7T33aHRj
— wta (@WTA) June 13, 2024