{"id":791,"date":"2014-01-22T23:42:30","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T23:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/?p=791"},"modified":"2014-01-22T23:42:30","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T23:42:30","slug":"australian-open-to-have-first-time-women-champion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/tennis\/australian-open-to-have-first-time-women-champion\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian Open to have first-time women champion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two-time defending champion Victoria Azarenka followed Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova out\u00a0of the Australian Open Wednesday in another big shock that ensures the Grand Slam tournament will have a new women&#8217;s champion.<\/p>\n<p>The Belarusian was bundled out in the quarter-finals by Poland&#8217;s Agnieszka Radwansa 6-1, 5-7, 6-0, meaning the top three women&#8217;s seeds have all failed spectacularly at the season-opening major.<\/p>\n<p>World number one Williams crashed in the third round and third seed Sharapova slumped in the fourth, in a tournament of upsets that also saw defending men&#8217;s champion Novak Djokovic\u00a0Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The cool and collected Radwanska was inspired, running down every ball and getting the crowd at Rod Laver Arena on their feet with her blistering groundstrokes.<\/p>\n<p>Her convincing win set up a clash against 20th seed Dominika Cibulkovaseed,\u00a0who thrashed Romanian 11th Simona Halep\u00a06-3, 6-0 to storm into only her second Grand Slam semi-final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two-time defending champion Victoria Azarenka followed Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova out\u00a0of the Australian Open Wednesday in another big shock that ensures the Grand Slam tournament will have a new women&#8217;s champion. The Belarusian was bundled out in the quarter-finals by Poland&#8217;s Agnieszka Radwansa 6-1, 5-7, 6-0, meaning the top three women&#8217;s seeds have all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}