MELBOURNE (Reuters) -Former Wimbledon finalist Nick Kyrgios has signalled his intention to play at next year’s Australian Open by signing up for the Kooyong Classic warm-up exhibition event.<\/p>\n
The mercurial 30-year-old Australian has been ravaged by career-threatening injuries over the last couple of years and played only five singles matches in the 2025 season, the most recent at the Miami Open in March. <\/p>\n
Now 666th in the world with no protected ranking, Kyrgios will need wildcards to play any of the ATP warm-up tournaments ahead of the Australian Open, as well as at the Grand Slam tournament itself. <\/p>\n
Those wildcards are likely to be forthcoming if requested given Kyrgios is a former champion at the Brisbane International and a perennial crowd favourite at Melbourne Park.<\/p>\n
Kyrgios was already scheduled to play other exhibition matches before the end of this year, including his “battle of the sexes” clash with Aryna Sabalenka in Dubai on Dec. 28. <\/p>\n
The Kooyong Classic will have a strong Italian flavour next year with Davis Cup heroes Flavio Cobolli and Matteo Berrettini as well as world number eight Lorenzo Musetti all also confirmed in the men’s field. <\/p>\n
The exhibition tournament, which did not take place this year because of operational issues, runs from January 13 to 15, three days before the Grand Slam season kicks off a few kilometres up the Yarra River at Melbourne Park. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Peter Rutherford)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MELBOURNE (Reuters) -Former Wimbledon finalist Nick Kyrgios has signalled his intention to play at next year’s Australian Open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,6675,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-307068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-na","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}