Dan Evans made it three British victories in quick succession at the Australian Open with a 6-4, 6-3, 6-0 success against David Goffin.

Evans, who joins Andy Murray and Heather Watson in the second round,  has begun the season in fine form while former top-10 star Goffin has been plagued by injury troubles and pulled out with a knee issue during a match versus Murray in Sydney last week.

Goffin initially kept pace with his opponent but Evans, the 24th seed, broke to take the opening set and from there was relatively comfortable in a victory lasting an hour and 48 minutes.

Watson gained her first grand slam victory in a year with a three-set success over Mayar Sherif of Egypt.

Wins have been hard to come by recently for Watson but she ended a seven-match losing run dating back to August in Adelaide last week and carried that confidence into Melbourne.

She is now ranked down at 94, 32 places lower than Sherif, who has been heading in the other direction.

But Watson played a fine match to win 6-3 5-7 6-2, thumping 40 winners and putting aside the disappointment of losing the second set.

Iga Swiatek won 11 games in a row to defeat Britain's Harriet Dart in the first round of the Australian Open.

Dart came through qualifying for the third time here in four years, and for the third time found herself on Rod Laver Arena facing one of the big names.

She suffered the dreaded double bagel against Maria Sharapova in 2019 before a much better performance against Simona Halep the following year.

Dart, ranked 123, made a good start against seventh seed Swiatek, leading 3-1, but the Pole began to cut out the errors and, despite not doing too much wrong in the second set, the British number three failed to win another game.

'First rounds are always tricky and with the sun out on the other side it was pretty hard to serve,' Swiatek said afterwards. 

'I told myself to be patient. I had this faith in myself that I would find a rhythm somehow.

'It is hard to achieve perfection and there is going to be mistakes like today at the beginning of the match. 

'Normally I get really angry about that but now I'm focused on finding solutions and working on technical stuff.'

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