Radwanska plays through the pain to reach last 16 at Australian O
Radwanska plays through the pain to reach last 16 at Australian O
MELBOURNE: Agnieszka Radwanska, playing through the pain of a leg injury, rode an opening set onslaught to take a place in the last 16 of the Australian Open with a 6-4 6-0 victory over Monica Puig on Friday.The fourth seed was forced to pull out of the Sydney warm-up because of her troublesome left leg and had lengthy medical treatment on it between the two sets in the 76-minute third round match.”Pain is my second name,” the Pole said. “The spray doesn’t work, the strapping doesn’t work, I just have to get on with. I am used to it. I can still play my best tennis. You just have to deal with it.”Radwanska looked up against it when the big-hitting Puerto Rican broke for 4-3 in the first set on Margaret Court Arena but the Pole won the next three games to go 1-0 up before racing through the second stanza in just 27 minutes.”She started really well,” the 26-year-old said. “I didn’t expect that. Everything was going really fast and she was playing with such intensity. I was in big trouble in that first set.”Radwanska, a semi-finalist at Melbourne Park in 2014, next faces 21-year-old German Anna-Lena Friedsam, who beat last year’s U.S. Open runner up Roberta Vinci in the third round on Friday.’