Matilde Jorge, Inês Murta and Angelina Voloshchuk won this Tuesday, October 24th, at the Loulé Ladies Open by Cimpor, which was affected again due to rain.
The only Portuguese woman with direct entry into the main singles table, Matilde Jorge (currently in 548th place in the WTA rankings) came out on top in her reunion with Elizabet Hamaliy, who had been away from the competition for two months due to a hyperextension in her left arm.
The scores of 6-1 and 6-3 attest to the dominance of the Vimaranense, only 19 years old, in a duel that pitted two players from the High Performance Center of the Portuguese Tennis Federation face to face and which, due to rain, was interrupted for three hours at the start of the second set.
The conclusion came in another short, because it dried out faster than when Jorge and Hamaliy started playing, and the Portuguese-Ukrainian took advantage of the break to increase the intensity and offer more resistance to the opponent, who knew how to remain authoritative at the beginning of the game to dominate in the exchanges of mostly short balls and win in 64 minutes.
“I don't like facing her, but I tried to deal with it the best I could. We were both nervous, but overall I think I did well. We didn't have very long exchanges of balls, so the service and the response were very important and I focused as much as possible", she explained at the end, when the rain was already threatening a new interruption.
Qualified for the second round, Matilde Jorge will have to wait for Wednesday's meeting between Belgian Hanne Vandewinkel (362nd WTA) and French Mathilde Lollia (who a year ago was 1310th WTA) to find out her next opponent. This week, the young Portuguese chose not to participate in the doubles variant.
If Matilde Jorge went ahead, Algarve's Amália Suciu, just 16 years old, was unable to do the same and gave in to the favorite Diana Marcinkevica (372nd), from Latvia and seventh pre-designated, by 6-3 and 6- 1.
Today, there will be three more Portuguese women looking to qualify for the second round and at least one of them will be able to achieve it. This is because Angelina Voloshchuk (798th WTA) started the day by winning the match in the last round of qualifying, by an authoritative 6-1 and 6-1 against Carolina Mesquita (1367th), and shortly afterwards she was drawn against another compatriot, The wild card Ana Filipa Santos (recently returned from a one-year break after tearing her anterior cruciate ligament and fracturing the internal meniscus of her left knee).
«I played well, I already knew more or less what I had to do and I managed to maintain my intensity and play my tennis», stated the current under 16 national champion before promising to «give my all» in the second consecutive match against a Portuguese.
Before, Inês Murta had already become the first Portuguese winner of the day. Recovering from a stress fracture in the pedicle of a vertebra that kept her out of the competition for six months, the 26-year-old from Algarve (currently in 861st place in the rankings) held off Switzerland's Nicole Gadient (1253rd and responsible for Teresa's removal Franco Dias the day before) by 6-2 and 6-1.
The clear victory, in just 66 minutes, gave Murta the ticket to the main table, in which she will have Natalia Szabanin as her first opponent. The Hungarian is ranked 546th in the world hierarchy, but less than a year ago she ranked 245th following the first three titles of her career (all in $25.000 tournaments, but on clay).
Today's match began at 10 am and, in addition to the 00 matches from the first round of singles still to be played, it will also feature five from the inaugural round of the doubles variant that remained to be concluded.
The Algarvian Iara Guerreiro Gonçalves (who the day before made her debut on the world circuit at the age of 15 with a victory before being eliminated in the singles qualifying) and the Spanish Paula Moreno Hurtado withdrew when they lost 6-1 and 2-0 to Isabella Shinikova and Amelie Van Impe, the pre-designated thirds, and Sara Nunca and Angelina Voloshchuk saw Matilda Mutavdzic and Stephanie Judith Visscher (fourth favorites) come from behind to win 3-6, 6-3, 10-4.
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