Lulu Sun has walloped her compatriot Conny Perrin in the first round of qualifying at the indoor tournament in Midland, allowing her to win just three games as they raced through the match in well under an hour. Unfortunately the only available stream was a very low quality one that hiccupped and buffered continuously, making it very difficult to figure out what happened on a lot of the points.
Perrin held comfortably to start before hitting a couple of unforced backhand errors to allow the left-hander to do the same. Sun hit a fabulous inside-out forehand winner in the next game, but Perrin went on to hold after a deuce. Sun then had to save a break point after hitting a double fault, but finished the game strongly with a beautiful inside-out forehand winner and her first ace.
The next game was where it all started to go wrong for Perrin, as she won just the first point before finishing the game by put4ting two shots into the net. Sun hit a beautiful forehand winner down the line on the way to holding serve to consolidate the break before Perrin had an even worse game than the one before, hitting two double faults as she lost her serve again. Perrin did hit a fabulous cross-court forehand passing shot as Sun was serving out the set, but that was the only sign of resistance before she was forced to hit a backhand volley into the net to end the set after 27 minutes.
The start of the second set was no better for Perrin, with Sun hitting a fabulous cross-court forehand winner in the opening game to create a break point, but Perrin threw caution to the wind after her first serve went into the net and boomed down one of the best second serve aces you could hope to see, the ball screaming past Sun out wide. She couldn’t build on that effort, though, with a backhand over the baseline being followed by a shot into the net to end a great rally. Sun then held to love, with consecutive aces after an unreturnable serve, and a nice forehand winner down the line to finish. That made it seven games in a row for her, but Perrin finally added to her score when she finished the next game with a fabulous cross-court forehand winner.
Obviously there may have been better shots amongst those that I didn’t see, but the best that I did was a fantastic forehand winner down the line from Sun in the next game. She followed that with a fabulous cross-court backhand drop shot, and Perrin finished the game with a forehand into the net before again getting broken to love, the highlight being another fabulous forehand winner down the line from Sun.
The left-hander finished the next game with two more aces as she raced towards the finish line, leaving Perrin serving to stay in the match. She was doing fine at 40-15, but lost the next three points, the backhand being forced wide on the last being the only one I saw, and that gave Sun a match point. Sun’s forehand return went into the net to make this the only game which went to a second deuce, but Perrin found the net again to give away a second match point. I have no idea what happened next, except that Sun won the point to finish the match after 49 minutes. The final score was 6-2, 6-1.