Elina Svitolina keeps on winning as she eliminated the ninth-seeded Daria Kasatkina to advance at the 2023 Roland Garros.
In the past, the two met six times on the WTA Tour and their H2H record has been quite one-sided. The Ukrainian won all of the matches and despite being away from the competition for a long time, she was certainly coming into the match with a lot of confidence, especially after being on a seven-match winning streak.
Svitolina won the 2023 Strasbourg Open and she defeated all of the opponents that she met in Paris. But so did her fourth-round opponent, Kasatkina, who even did it without losing a single set, also showing good form in the French capital.
The first set started really well for the Ukrainian as she built a quick two-break lead and even though Kasatkina responded with one break in the sixth game, the lead was big enough for Svitolina to win the first set.
But Kasatkina, who recently mentioned that she would like to have longer changeovers at Grand Slams, had a strong start into the second set, winning the first two games and having one game point on her serve to go 3-0 up.
Yet, Svitolina fought back, this time winning three consecutive games and going up by a break. In the remainder of the first set, both players broke each other's serve back and forth, with the Ukrainian even having a match point in the tenth game.
However, she wasn't able to convert that, and eventually, the second set reached a tie-break. Once again, it was full of mini-breaks but Svitolina proved to be a better player, winning the match 6-4, 7-6(5) to match her best-ever result at the Roland Garros, reaching the quarterfinals.
After her Strasbourg triumph, Svitolina moved up by 316 places and after the second Grand Slam of the season, she's expected to move even further, this time by around 119 places and enter the Top 100 again.
Many fans were also interested to see if Svitolina will shake her opponent's hand because of her Russian nationality. In the previous round, she didn't do it when facing Anna Blinkova, but the deciding factor in this match may have been Kasatkina's stance, as she has been really vocal about her support for Ukraine. But the handshake didn't happen, yet it seemed that Kasatkina was the player, acknowledging that it wouldn't be appropriate.
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