Magda Linette reached a career milestone in the second round of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, beating No. 8 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova 6-2, 4-6, 6-1. The 34-year-old Polish No. 2 secured the 20th Top 20 victory of her career.

Linette built an early lead, taking the first set 6-2 and moving ahead 1-0 in the second. Alexandrova answered by winning five consecutive games to lead 5-1 in the second set, but Linette recovered, winning the next three games before Alexandrova closed out the set. In the third set Linette opened a 5-0 advantage and served out the match two games later.

“The plan was to kind of not let her lead because she can really take the racquet out of your hands,” Linette said in her on-court interview. “She can make you feel like you’re not able to really do anything. She can start playing so well that it feels really difficult to come back.

“But in the third set I started really well and kept it going.”

A telling statistic was unforced errors: Linette made 25 to Alexandrova’s 46. Linette also finished with one more winner than her opponent. Alexandrova entered the match ranked No. 12; Linette’s victory over her provided the 20th Top 20 scalp of Linette’s career.

Nearly all of those Top 20 wins have come in recent seasons. Nineteen of Linette’s 20 career Top 20 victories have been recorded in the last five years, since she turned 29, a run that underlines her status as one of the tour’s late bloomers. Linette is a former Top 20 player herself, having reached No. 19 in 2023. She is currently ranked No. 50 and is the Polish No. 2 behind world No. 2 Iga Swiatek.

Alexander Bublik moved into the Rotterdam semifinals after a dramatic three-set victory over Jaume Munar, winning 6-4, 6-7 (4), 7-6 (3) in a match that lasted two hours and 42 minutes. The triumph was the 200th tour-level win of Bublik’s career, the first time a man representing Kazakhstan in the Open Era has reached that mark.

The 28-year-old continued a rich run of form. He is 41-11 since the start of Roland Garros last year, a stretch that included his first Grand Slam quarterfinal at Roland Garros and a sequence of deep runs that has produced seven semifinals in the last eight months. That period also brought five titles in Halle, Gstaad, Kitzbuhel, Hangzhou and Hong Kong, plus his first Masters 1000 semifinal in Paris.

Bublik is also only the 14th man born in 1997 or later to record 200 career tour-level wins. On Friday he came close to closing Munar out in straight sets but was forced into a deciding set. It was his third three-setter of the week. Down an early break at 2-1 in the final set, Bublik immediately broke back, steadied on serve and carried his momentum into the final-set tiebreak. He opened the breaker 4-1 and held on to clinch the win.

“I’m really lucky at the end that I served unbelievably,” Bublik said afterwards. “I only served first serves in the tie-break, so I guess that was the key in the third set. But I’m really tired—I just need to find a way to recover for tomorrow’s match.”

Awaiting Bublik in the semifinals is world No. 6 Felix Auger-Aliassime, who defeated Tallon Griekspoor 7-6 (2), 6-2 earlier in the day.

Taylor Fritz received an unusual and spirited reception at the Nexo Dallas Open when dozens of fans on center court wore his signature black BOSS headband.

BOSS, Fritz’s apparel sponsor and an official partner of the Dallas Open, distributed the headbands during Tuesday’s first-round match against Marcos Giron. “It’s crazy tonight! Everywhere I look everyone’s dressed like me,” Fritz said, laughing during his on-court interview. “After what happened at the Open, I’m not surprised.” The stunt referenced a viral moment from last year’s US Open, when Fritz accidentally wore his BOSS headband upside down in his quarterfinal versus Novak Djokovic. Blair Henley’s own headband was upside down during the interview in a cheeky nod to that incident.

“The second I saw it, I was just like…” he said, mimicking a facepalm. Fritz later logged on to X and asked, “why’d nobody tell me?” “No one said anything to me, so that was crazy,” he recalled in Dallas. “Even when I went in to change after the second set, and I looked in the mirror myself and I didn’t notice. I just changed headbands, but I put it on right that time!”

Fritz returned to competition for the first time since reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open, where he fell to No. 5 seed Lorenzo Musetti in straight sets. He opened in Dallas with a gritty 6-4, 5-7, 7-6 (1) win over Giron, firing 21 aces in a match that lasted nearly two and a half hours. He followed that with a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Brandon Nakashima.

There was a brief scare in the opener when Fritz felt a “sharp pain” after a “strange twist” in his right knee during the first set against Giron and called for the physio, raising concerns as he manages lingering tendinitis. “It had nothing to do with the tendinitis, the knee issue that I’ve been dealing with for a while now,” he said afterward. “It was weird… It was (during) the first point of his service game in that changeover. I felt like I tweaked my knee. I was getting a sharp pain.

“It got a little better the next game that I served and I just called Clay over to make sure it was good. And after he worked on it, honestly, no problems. It was just a weird little tweak.”