American teenager Ashlyn Krueger capped a breakthrough week at the Kinoshita Group Japan Open Tennis Championship by defeating No.1 seed Zhu Lin 6-3, 7-6(6) to win her first Hologic WTA Tour title.
Before her week in Osaka, Krueger’s best WTA result came this summer when she made the quarterfinals on grass in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. He came into the week without a main draw win on hard court this year.
In Osaka, the 19-year-old Texan didn’t drop a set, recording wins over No.8 seeds Kateryna Baindl, Jessika Ponchet, Anna Kalinskaya, and Mai Hontama before No.35 Zhu fell short in final. The win over Zhu was the second Top 50 win of his career.
Playing in his first tour-level final, Krueger beat Zhu from the baseline and never let the Chinese No.1 into his service games. Krueger fired 28 winners to Zhu’s 13. The match saw just one break of serve, with Krueger breaking Zhu in her first service game of the match. After consolidating the break for a 3-0 lead, Krueger eased up on his service games to take the first set.
The second set was rolled by the server, with neither player generating a break point. While Zhu was getting used to Krueger’s game, the top seed went into the tiebreak hopeful of his chance to take the match to a third set. Zhu got a set point at 6-5 but lost the baseline forehand exchange.
Krueger came in to hit a return winner at 6-6 to earn her first match point and close out the 96-minute victory with Zhu’s 16th unforced error of the day.
More to follow…