Daria Kasatkina assures she's back on track as she reaches Madrid Open third round

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  • Dasha gets her groove back!

    Daria Kasatkina believes she’s back on track after a brief struggle that followed her breakthrough runner-up showing at Indian Wells in March.

    The Russian, who turned 21 on Monday, snapped a three-match losing streak by defeat Wang Qiang in her Madrid opener, then claimed a smooth 6-3, 6-1 win over Romanian Sorana Cirstea to make the third round at the Caja Magica on Tuesday.

    Kasatkina had a huge two months earlier this season, making the semis in St. Petersburg, and the finals in Dubai and Indian Wells.

    She defeated five top-10 opponents during that stretch and catapulted herself to a career-high No. 11.

    But a quarter-final exit in Charleston – where she was the defending champion – along with opening round defeats in Miami, Stuttgart and Prague set Kasatkina back a little bit, but she’s happy to reveal that her mini slump is behind her now.

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  • “It was tough after Indian Wells, Miami, Charleston, mentally it was very tough to handle this. Then I arrived to European clay in Stuttgart, which was not like really clay, so it was tough,” Kasatkina told Sport360 in Madrid on Tuesday.

    “But I was pretty positive after that. I had a few tournaments which were like warm-up before the big ones like Madrid, Rome and Roland Garros. I started to work better and I feel much better so I think everything is going in the right way.

    “It’s a little bit pressure, some expectations from the side, and also from your side, you think if you play the finals of the big tournaments you need to play like this every week, which is really difficult. You have to get used to it and get more experience, so from this part it’s pretty tough but I’m getting used to it, thank to my team who is always supporting me.”

    As a former junior Roland Garros champion (2014), Kasatkina grew up loving the clay and her only career title thus far came on the green clay of Charleston last year.

    But her positive results on hard courts recently means she finds it hard to single out clay as her favourite surface nowadays.

    “In juniors I used to prefer it much more than hard court but for the moment I cannot say that I prefer clay to hard courts. I like clay, but at the same time I’m feeling pretty confident on hard courts too. I’m happy because it seems like my hard-court tennis went to another level which is good,” she explains.

    Kasatkina next faces either third-seeded home star Garbine Muguruza, or Croatian Donna Vekic in the third round in the Spanish capital.

    Besides getting to celebrate her birthday in Madrid, Kasatkina also watched Sunday’s Clasico closely, as an avid Barcelona fan.

    She once said that if she were a football player, she would be Andres Iniesta and she admits she got emotional watching him contest his last-ever Clasico.

    “I was watching of course two days ago. It was very emotional, I almost cried when he left the field. Time flies unfortunately. But it was a very nice story,” said the Russian.

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