There were shocks and surprises at the Miami Open on Sunday when three of the tournament’s highly ranked players were beaten in the fourth round – 6th seed Angelique Kerber, 11th seed Nadia Petrova and 14th seed Maria Kirilenko. The biggest shock of the tournament so far was28th seeded Roumanian Sorana Cirstea’s straight sets win over Kerber. The first set of this match saw a series of breaks until the players reached 4-4, but from then on it was all Cirstea, as she won the next eight games to score a 6-4 6-0 victory, her next opponent will be Jelena Jankovic.
Jankovic, seeded at 22, also won in straight sets, but she had a real battle on her hands against Nadia Petrova. In an exciting match that lasted two hours and seventeen minutes, the first set went to a breaker, which Jankovic took 7-5 after saving set point at 5-6 in an hour and twenty minutes. In the second equally tight set, which took fifty seven minutes to complete, the Serb edged the Russian 6-4 to move into the quarter finals.
21st seeded Czech Klara Zakopalova had a good win over the 14th seeded Russian, Maria Kirilenko. Both of these players have been playing very well for the past few months and on Sunday it was the Czech who raced to a 6-2 first set and a 4-2 lead in the second before she let things slip and allowed the Russian back to take three consecutive games for a 5-4 and 40-15 lead. Not to be outdone, Zakopalova held that game and went on to take the set on a breaker 7-4, to set up a meeting with Maria Sharapova in the quarters.
To see all our predictions for upcoming matches, based on our machine learning model analysing results since 1960, see our tennis predictions page here.
