Lilli Tagger, the 18-year-old Austrian playing her first main draw at the event, won her first WTA title on Sunday, beating No. 8 seed Daria Snigur of Ukraine 7-6, 6-2 in the final of the Livesport Prague Open. The result lifts Tagger from No. 74 to a new career-high No. 45, making her the youngest player in the world\u2019s top 50.<\/p>\n
Snigur came out of the blocks fastest, breaking twice to open a 3-0 lead in the first set and looking firmly in control. Tagger settled, working her way back to 3-1 and 4-2, but Snigur held to push to 5-2, one game from serving out the set.<\/p>\n
Tagger dug in from there: she broke back to close to 5-3, then broke again as Snigur dropped serve to level at 5-4, and levelled the set outright at 5-5. Both players held to force a tiebreak at 6-6, and it was Tagger who took control there too, racing through it 7-3 to close out the opening set 7-6.<\/p>\n
The momentum carried straight into the second set. Tagger broke twice in the opening four games to open a 1-4 lead, and never let Snigur back into the match, closing it out 6-2 to seal her maiden WTA title.<\/p>\n
Tagger\u2019s second WTA showpiece on the WTA Tour<\/p>\n
Tagger has defeated No. 3 seed Sara Bejlek in the quarter-finals and No. 2 seed Barbora Krejcikova in a three-set semi-final.<\/p>\n
She becomes only the second player ranked outside the top 50 to win the Prague title, after Marie Bouzkova did so as world No. 66 in 2022, and the lowest-ranked champion in the tournament\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
The final was Tagger\u2019s second WTA showpiece of her young career, after finishing runner-up at Jiujiang in 2025. Snigur, appearing in her first career final, had also enjoyed a breakthrough week, reaching a new career-high ranking of No. 54 after wins that included a run to her first WTA final.<\/p>\n
Tagger\u2019s title also makes her the second teenager to win a WTA crown this year, after Mirra Andreeva, who has already claimed three titles in 2026. Born in February 2008, Tagger followed a strong junior pedigree into the professional ranks, having won the 2025 Roland-Garros girls\u2019 singles title, becoming the first Austrian to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lilli Tagger, the 18-year-old Austrian playing her first main draw at the event, won her first WTA title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":827365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-827364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827364","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=827364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/827365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}