Venus Williams opens Rogers Cup with blowout win over Barbora Strycova

Venus Williams of the United States returns to Barbora Strycova in their second round match at the Rogers Cup tennis tournament in Montreal, Canada. Venus won 6-3, 6-0. (Photo: AP)

Venus Williams breezed into the third round of the Rogers Cup in Montreal on Wednesday with a straight sets rout of Barbora Strycova as home hope Eugenie Bouchard upset 11th seed Dominika Cibulkova.

Sixth seed Venus, 36, showed no sign of lingering weariness following her defeat in the final of the WTA Stanford event in California last weekend, maintaining her 100 per cent record over Strycova with a 6-3, 6-0 win.

Venus was pleased to have wrapped up the win in under an hour after a marathon three-hour battle with Strycova in their previous encounter.

“It was definitely more straightforward I think than all of our other matches,” Venus said.

“I didn’t mind that, especially after playing a lot last week, just to be able to come out and hopefully advance to the next round. It’s been intense. Usually I don’t play this much back-to-back. But I knew what I was going to do going into the year, what it was going to take,” she added.

Strycova paid the price for a failure to put pressure on Williams’ suspect service game in the second set.

Strycova managed to earn only one break point — unconverted — but was in turn broken three times as Venus raced into the next round.

Meanwhile at the Toronto ATP Masters, home favourite Milos Raonic danced into the third round with a 6-3, 6-3 win over Lu Yen-hsun of Taipei. In other matches, Gael Monfils beat Vasek Pospisil of Canada 7-6 (8/6), 6-0 and Novak Djokovic got the better of Gilles Muller in two tough sets, 7-5, 7-6 (7/3).