Jessica Pegula moved into the Wimbledon fourth round on Friday with a brisk 6-1, 6-3 win over Jessica Bouzas Maneiro on Court 2, a match that never felt in doubt once she broke serve in the opening game and raced to a 4-0 lead. The No. 4 seed finished it in 52 minutes, her cleanest performance of the fortnight and her second trip to the round of 16 at the All England Club.
That matters now because Wimbledon has been Pegula’s least successful Grand Slam, even though she arrived with a strong grass-court record and had already won six of her seven matches on the surface this season. For a player who had only eight main-draw wins in six previous appearances at the tournament, this was the kind of match that changes the feel of a campaign: quick, controlled and built on an immediate grip on the points.
Pegula said she thought it was really clean and that it was the best match she has played in the tournament, and the numbers back that up. She improved to 13-1 this season against opponents ranked outside the Top 50 and to 2-0 against Bouzas Maneiro on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz. Bouzas Maneiro briefly led 2-1 in the second set, but Pegula took the next five games and never let the contest reopen.
The cleaner striking also offered a simple explanation for why this looked better than her earlier rounds: she started fast, held the center of the match and avoided the scrappy spells that can drag a favorite into trouble on grass. That was important after her runner-up finish in Berlin last week, where the physical load had already been building before she returned to Wimbledon and found a shorter, sharper route through this one.
Her next opponent is Iva Jovic, who reached the fourth round for the first time by beating Ekaterina Alexandrova 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 on Court 12 after two hours and 30 minutes. Jovic, 18, has now won three matches against Top 20 opponents and leveled her record with Alexandrova at 1-1, but she also admitted how hard she had to fight to finish it, saying her serve was deteriorating late and that she had to hang tough in two service games while saving break points in both.
That meeting gives Pegula another familiar test. She has already beaten Jovic twice this season, in Dubai in February and again in Charleston, and those results should matter because the American teenager’s first week at Wimbledon has been built on staying alive under pressure. The question now is whether Jovic can stretch Pegula beyond the kind of control she showed on Friday, or whether Pegula’s sharpest match of the tournament becomes the one that carries her deeper into the second week.
