In a second round match at the Indian Wells tournament being played this week and next, Russian 2nd seed Maria Sharapova took on the Italian, Francesca Schiavone. Sharapova had a first round bye, while Schiavone had taken out her countrywoman, Flavia Panetta, in her first round match. As was to be expected, the Russian was far too strong for the wily Italian – even in the cold and windy conditions which made the ball play much slower – and she took this match 6-2 6-1 in two minutes over the hour. Sharapova’s next opponent will be 36th seed Carla Suarez Navarro of Spain.
In another match featuring a Russian, Svetlana Kuznetsova overcame a terrible start in which she lost the first set to love against 18th seeded Jelena Jankovic, but regrouped and found her touch to take the next two sets 6-2 and 7-5 to move into the third round, where she will play against 9th seeded Marion Bartoli of France.
12th seeded Slovak, Dominika Cibulkova, also had a bye in the first round and played her first match of the tournament against Simona Halep of Roumania, who is ranked at 56. Halep had a very easy 6-2 6-0 first round win against the American, Lauren Davis, but was made to work very hard for every hard fought point against Cibulkova, who eventually took the first set 7-5 and the second on a tie break 7-6 (7-3) to book her third round match against Czech Klara Zakopalova, the 19th seed.
To see all our predictions for upcoming matches, based on our machine learning model analysing results since 1960, see our tennis predictions page here.
