In the Acapulco final last year, one player was on the comeback trail, while another was ready to prove she was worth the hype. A lot has changed in a year, with Sloane Stephens sidelined with a foot injury, and Dominika Cibulkova sitting at a career-high ranking.
For American Stephens, a tremendous weight was lifted off her back in the summer of 2015 after she won her first career title in Washington, D.C.. Before that week, even though she was on the verge of reaching the Top 10, she had yet to reach a singles final. While she didn’t win another title the rest of the year, there was reason for optimism in 2016, and that feeling paid off early as she won the Australian Open warmup in Auckland to kick off the year.
Cibulkova, on the other hand, was coming off a mostly forgettable 2015 as she suffered an Achilles injury that hampered her for months. It was the first time since 2010 that she had failed to reach a final.
In Acapulco, both players took completely divergent paths to the final. Cibulkova, the 2014 Acapulco champion, advanced to play the top seed, Victoria Azarenka, in the second round. However, Azarenka had to withdraw before the match due to an ankle issue. Cibulkova fought through her next two matches to make her first final since ’14. On the bottom half of the draw, Stephens, the second seed, lost the first set in her first match against Louisa Chirico but breezed from there to reach her second final of the year.
With her aggressive mind-set, it was Stephens who struck first. She captured the first set 6-4 and was up a break in the second. But true to her grind-it-out mentality, Cibulkova rallied, winning the second set 6-4.
In the third, the two were level until the fifth game, when Stephens broke Cibulkova’s serve. Once again, the Slovakian came up with the goods, breaking her American opponent right back. From there, the two stayed on serve until the deciding tiebreak. Cibulkova got the first mini-break, but from 2-1 down, Stephens took the next four points. She soon earned three match points, and clinched it on her third, winning the tiebreak 7-5, to take her second title of the season.
5
Over the course of her first three career finals, Stephens had won five consecutive sets. The middle set loss to Cibulkova in Acapulco was her first in a title match.
2
For the second final in a row, Cibulkova came out on the losing end of a third-set tiebreak as Donna Vekic won their title-round encounter at the Malaysian Open in 2014, 5-7, 7-5, 7-6 (4).
