It was far from convincing, but Barbora Krejcikova kept her Wimbledon defence on track on Thursday - just - with a laboured 6-4, 3-6, 6-2 second round win over American Caroline Dolehide.
The Czech creaked rather than cruised into the third round, moving past the American in a match as scrappy as a Henman Hill picnic after a seagull attack.
Court Two spectators, many blissfully unaware they were watching the reigning champion, might be forgiven — Krejcikova herself barely looked the part.
A season dogged by back and thigh niggles has left her short of sharpness, and her patchy 4-3 record for the season coming in was on full display in a match strewn with errors.
Still, the 17th seed did just enough to scrape through to gentle applause and a sterner test ahead: 10th seed Emma Navarro, who won't be quite so generous.
Swiatek fights back to down McNally
Iga Swiatek may not love the grass but she seems to relish a battle whatever the surface and showed all that fighting spirit as she clawed back to beat American Caty McNally 5-7, 6-2, 6-1 and reach the third round.
McNally, the World No. 208, looked poised to cause an upset when she clawed her way back from 4-1 down to take the first set against the five-times Grand Slam champion.
At that point Swiatek's mediocre record at the All England Club, where the Pole has never gone past the quarterfinals, seemed to be weighing heavily on her shoulders.
But rather than shy away from the scrap, the former World No. 1 seemed to flick a psychological switch that saw her come out for the second set transformed, upping her aggression and playing with a ferocity McNally simply could not handle.
She broke early in the second set and never looked back, losing only three more games to set up a third-round match against another American Danielle Collins.
Rybakina breezes past Sakkari
Former Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina barely needed to shift out of second gear as the 11th seed motored into the third round of the grasscourt Grand Slam with a 6-3, 6-1 victory over Greek Maria Sakkari.
Rybakina was gifted a break in the opening game when Sakkari produced three successive double faults and the 2022 Wimbledon champion held firm from there to wrap up the opening set with minimum fuss in front of a sparse crowd on Court One.
The 26-year-old dropped her serve in the opening game of the next set but responded immediately to get things back on track and then broke to love for a 3-1 lead, before proceeding to take apart former World No. 3 Sakkari.
A backhand error on match point compounded Sakkari's woes and Rybakina celebrated the victory in typically muted fashion, with either Denmark's 23rd-seeded Clara Tauson or Russian Anna Kalinskaya awaiting her in the next round.
Andreeva advances
Seventh seed Mirra Andreeva blasted her way into the third round with a 6-1, 7-6(4) victory over Italy's Lucia Bronzetti and thanked her coach, former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martinez, for making her work hard.
The 18-year-old Russian was the only teenager from six women's starters to have made it through to the second round and she looked sure-footed on Wimbledon's grass, the surface where she hit the headlines aged 16 with a whirlwind race to the fourth round in 2023.
She completely dominated her 26-year-old opponent in the first set on Thursday using her big serve, heavy slice and neat net play to wrap it up in 23 minutes.
But she had a fight on her hands in the second as Bronzetti, ranked a lowly 63, found her stride and range in the second. Andreeva eventually triumphed on her second match point in the tiebreak, with a fine forehand volley winner.
"I got a little bit nervous and she started to play better," Andreeva said in a courtside interview before adding she would not be getting much time off because she had doubles to play and then Martinez would want to run over some elements of her game.
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