No pain, no gain for Kvitova as she reaches round three

LONDON (Reuters): Petra Kvitova’s decision to give her shoes an almighty whack with her racket turned out to be a masterstroke as the Czech’s legs finally started to move more freely, and she eked out a 7-5 6-2 win over Kristina Mladenovic at Wimbledon on Thursday. 

The sixth seed did not exactly enjoy the most promising of starts - she was broken in the opening game and fell 5-3 behind when she squandered three break points in the eighth game.

Kvitova took out her frustrations on her personalised shoes, giving one of them such a powerful blow with her racket frame that it briefly left her grimacing — and that proved to be her French opponent’s undoing.Two games later,  Kvitova saved three set points to level for 5-5 and it was a setback Mladenovic could not recover from.

The 2011 and 2014 champion, still sporting a bandage around her left elbow after missing the French Open with an arm injury, started swinging more freely as she won 10 of the last 12 games to book a third-round place for the first time since 2015.

Kvitova will next face Poland’s Magda Linette for a place in the last 16.