Karolina Muchova captured her first career grass-court singles title at the Bad Homburg Open after Naomi Osaka retired early in the second set of Saturday’s final.<\/p>\n
Muchova, ranked No. 11 in the PIF WTA Rankings, was leading 6-1, 1-0 when Osaka, who was also seeking her first grass-court singles title on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, retired because of a foot injury.<\/p>\n
Muchova made a dominant start, breaking serve twice to race to a 4-0 lead before Osaka got on the scoreboard by holding serve. She maintained her advantage and broke Osaka again in the seventh game to take the opening set 6-1.<\/p>\n
Muchova held serve to lead 1-0 in the second set when Osaka, who had taken a medical timeout during the first set for the injury, decided she could not continue after 46 minutes.<\/p>\n
The title is Muchova’s third career singles crown and her second of the season after winning the WTA 1000 event in Doha. The victory also levels her head-to-head record with Osaka at 3-3 and improves her record to 3-6 in WTA singles finals.<\/p>\n
Osaka, who was bidding for her first WTA-level singles title since winning the Australian Open in 2021, falls to 7-7 in WTA singles finals.<\/p>\n
She has now finished runner-up in three consecutive finals since her triumph in Melbourne and apologized to the crowd during the on-court trophy presentation.<\/p>\n
“I just want to say thank you to everyone who came to watch the match,” the former world No. 1 told the crowd. “I apologize for not being able to finish, but this atmosphere was incredible throughout the week.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Karolina Muchova captured her first career grass-court singles title at the Bad Homburg Open after Naomi Osaka retired…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":["post-765571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}