Thanks to the victory, Clara Tauson is ready for the third round at the WTA 1000 tournament Indian Wells, where she lost last year to Mirra Andreeva 6-3, 6-0.
In the third round, she will face the 21-year old Australian Talia Gibson, who is ranked 112th in the world. In her second round match, she beat the strong Russian Ekaterina Alexandrova. Tauson has never met the Australian before.
Both players really struggled to get their own service games going, and at 4-4, the spectators had experienced no less than a total of six service breaks. The rhythm in the game was also not helped by the fact that the game was forced into a lengthy delay when there suddenly weren't any more new balls at disposal with the score 4-3 in Tauson's favor.
The first set was to be decided in a tiebreaker, where Tauson got off to the best start, leading 3-0 and 6-3 after two minibreaks. But it was not enough to break Putintseva, who fought for every ball.
The Kazakh took back the two minibreaks on Tauson's serve and also won two points on her own serve. Thus, the score went from 3-6 to 7-6 and set point for Putintseva.
Tauson fended off the set point and instead played her way to her fourth set point, which was also missed.
The drama continued with the second set point for Putintseva, which Tauson also fended off, before she capitalized on her fifth set point to win the tiebreaker 11-9.
Putintseva continued to fight for the cause at the start of the second set, but the opening set seemed to have taken its toll on the Kazakh as Tauson broke for 3-1.
Tauson didn't look back and comfortably closed out the match with another break of serve.