Katie Boulter suffered a first-round exit at the Linz Open in Austria, losing in straight sets to Elena-Gabriela Ruse on Monday.<\/p>\n
Ruse edged a tight contest by getting the better of a couple of tie-breakers, coming through 7-6 (6-3) 7-6 (6-2) against the British No 3.<\/p>\n
Boulter got off to a sluggish start, being broken in her opening two service games of the match, but battled back from 3-1 down to restore parity at 4-4 in the first set.<\/p>\n
Ruse – ranked 25 spots below Boulter at 87th in the world – would go on to comfortably take the opening tie-break but the Romanian was broken immediately to start the second set.<\/p>\n
Boulter would fail to capitalise, however, as she was broken straight back – and again after nudging 3-2 ahead.<\/p>\n
Serving to stay in the match down 6-5, Boulter saved a match point at 30-40 and would ultimately hold to force another breaker.<\/p>\n
But, after taking a 2-1 lead in the second-set decider, Boulter lost the next six points to end her tournament early and get her 2026 clay-court season off to a disappointing start.<\/p>\n
Ruse will next face Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska or American seventh seed Ann Li in the last 16.<\/p>\n
Watch the ATP and WTA Tours, live on Sky Sports or stream with NOW<\/a> and the Sky Sports app<\/a>, giving Sky Sports customers access to over 50 per cent more live sport this year at no extra cost. Find out more here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katie Boulter suffered a first-round exit at the Linz Open in Austria, losing in straight sets to Elena-Gabriela…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-516741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}