French Open champion Garbine Muguruza saved a match point before seeing off Russia's Daria Kasatkina in the second round of the Brisbane International on Tuesday. The 23-year-old Spaniard won 7-5, 3-6, 7-6 (9/7) over the 19-year-old Kasatkina, who served for the match at 5-4 in the third set, only to be broken by the fourth-seeded Muguruza.

Muguruza then kept her nerve in the tiebreak, holding on to win in just under three hours. It was her second three-set win in as many days after she edged Australian Samantha Stosur on Monday. "Obviously I'm tired," Muguruza said. "I would prefer to play a one-hour match and to be super good. But I think those tough matches are going to help me to win confidence.

"It's very helpful. I mean, to start the year playing these kind of matches gives me, I don't know, a good feeling. "I think it was a battle, literally," she added. "I think we both played very good during the whole match. We could see in the tiebreak there is, like, nobody knew who was going to win the match until the end."

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2017