In a messy match, Garbine Muguruza ousted the Stanford defending champion and number six seed, Dominika Cibulkova, 6-2 4-6 6-2 in one hour and 56 minutes.  Muguruza played a fine opening set, hitting 13 winners to 12 unforced errors, mixing up her serve and maintaining an incredible depth on her groundstrokes and return.  Her shots down the centre and right on the baseline were pretty lethal and gave Cibulkova nothing to work with.  The quality of tennis was actually reasonable in the first set, but it dipped in the second set as both players struggled to hold serve.  Muguruza led by a set and a break; however she surrendered her lead with a terrible service game at *3-2 as her first serve disappeared and she made more unforced errors, most of them miles long of the baseline.  Cibulkova couldn’t serve out the set, but was handed it in the next game as Muguruza served up two consecutive double faults.  Like many players, the second serve is certainly a weakness that Muguruza can improve on.

The third set followed a similar pattern to the second set with neither player at their best.  I thought Cibulkova had the momentum going into the decider; however Garbine started with a confident service hold, broke and then most crucially, held a lengthy deuce game to consolidate the break.  It was this game at *2-1 in the decider that proved to be the clincher.  The pair traded breaks again with Cibulkova serving up two costly double faults on break points, one of which Domi responded with an angry racquet swipe.  Muguruza closed the match out convincingly for a really good win.  She really tailed off in the second set and appeared to lose concentration, but reined it back in in the decider.  Some of Garbine’s ball striking was really stunning.  The depth she gets on her strokes helped her to overpower Cibulkova and prevent the Slovak from really getting into this match.  This was a disappointing loss for Cibulkova, who continues to wobble after such a fabulous start to the season.  I agree with the tweet below from Davey on Twitter.

The match finished with 20 double faults and 13 breaks of serves. There was the odd excellent rally, but it was a scrappy match which was befitting of two players who had not played a competitive match since the first week of Wimbledon in the last week of June.  Muguruza goes through to play Daniela Hantuchova in the second round on Thursday.

Poll Result: 48% correctly predicted that Muguruza would defeat Cibulkova