Aryna Sabalenka will face a qualifier in her opening match at the Berlin Tennis Open, but her path will get a lot more difficult after that while Elena Rybakina and Madison Keys have been handed a difficult first-round match.
World No 1 Sabalenka headlines the top half of the draw and she has a bye into the second round along with Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula and Jasmine Paolini while she will start her campaign against a qualifier.
Rybakina and Zheng, who competed at the Queen’s Club Championship this week, will square off in the first round and the winner is projected to face Sabalenka in the quarter-final.
World No 4 Paolini and Grand Slam winners Keys and Marketa Vondrousova are also in the top half, but they are in the bottom bracket and the latter two will meet first up and the winner will take on either Diana Schnaider or Donna Vekic in the second round.
Fourth seed Paolini has a bye followed by a second-round clash against a qualifier before she meets the winner of the Keys/Vondrousova/Schnaider/Vekic encounter.
Zheng and Keys, though, are still alive at the Queen’s Club Championship as they will feature in the semi-finals on Saturday so don’t be too surprised if either or both withdraw from the Berlin event.
Zheng defeated Emma Raducanu in the quarter-final in London and the latter was also due to play in Berlin next week after receiving a wildcard, but withdrew as her back injury flared up again.
Former world No 4 Belinda Bencic was also due to feature at the WTA 500 tournament as she used her protected ranking to enter, but she was also a last-minute withdrawal.
Newly-crowned French Open champion Coco Gauff leads the bottom half and she faces either world No 16 Daria Kataskina or a qualifier in the round of 32 while eighth seed Paola Badosa is her projected quarter-final opponent.
WTA News
Emma Raducanu makes worrying confession as she admits her ‘goals have changed’
Badosa, though, has to get past highly-rated German wildcard Eva Lys in the first round and either Emma Navarro or Marta Kostyuk in the second round.
Third seed Pegula and sixth seed Mirra Andreeva are big names in the top half of the bottom bracket and the former will start her campaign against either Naomi Osaka or Liudmila Samsonova.
Teenager Andreeva starts against Magdalena Frech before meeting either Amanda Anisimova or Bianca Andreesca.
Of course, with Sabalenka in the top half and Gauff in the bottom half, there can only be a rematch of the recent French Open final between the pair in the final in Berlin.
Projected Quarter-Finals Based On Seeds:
Sabalenka v Zheng
Paolini v Keys
Andreeva v Pegula
Badosa v Gauff
The post Berlin Tennis Open draw: Sabalenka, Gauff find out paths as star names handed difficult openers appeared first on Tennis365.
Leave a Reply