Daria Kasatkina\u2019s career in Australian colours has plummeted to a new low at the Madrid Open after she suffered an agonising first-round defeat which will send her tumbling to her lowest world ranking for 11 years.<\/p>\n
On a day when all four Australian women crashed out in the clay-court event, Kasatkina suffered the most frustrating reverse, succumbing 6-3 3-6 7-6 (15-13) to qualifier and lucky loser Daria Snigur after being unable to convert four match points.<\/p>\n
Twelve months on since transferring her allegiance to Australian<\/a> tennis amid much fanfare, the 28-year-old Russian-born star has found it difficult to maintain her best form amid a turbulent time in her life, and even walked away from the sport<\/a> at the end of last year admitting she was at \u201cbreaking point\u201d.<\/p>\n Now after suffering another hip injury that took two months out of her 2026 season<\/a>, Kasatkina has returned to the court with two more defeats \u2013 and none more painful than Wednesday\u2019s defeat to Ukrainian Snigur as she lost the longest regular third-set tiebreak in WTA events for eight years.<\/p>\n Going downin the two-hour 23-minute battle, Kasatkina had four match points repelled and also saved six of her own before hooking a forehand wide.<\/p>\n The defeat left her with a record of four wins and eight losses for the season, and having played her first match as an Australian last April<\/a> when No 12 in the world and No 1 in the country, Kasatkina will now plummet to Australian No 5 and at least world No 83 in the next rankings \u2013 her lowest since 2015.<\/p>\n Kasatkina still must be trying to fathom how she lost this remarkable, entertaining match, having served for it at 6-5 in the final set when she earned her first match point.<\/p>\n But world No 98 Snigur, a lucky loser playing her first career tour-level match on clay, proved inspired in thwarting her more experienced opponent, leaving the Australian looking astonished when she pulled off one incredible backhand pass at full stretch when match-point down at 7-6 in the breaker.<\/p>\n Kasatkina wasn\u2019t the only Australian luminary to tumble at the famed Caja Magica venue, with the country\u2019s No 2 Talia Gibson<\/a>, breakthrough star of the hard-court swing<\/a> in the US, finding the clay much more of a slog as she went down 6-3 6-2 to Colombian Emiliana Arango.<\/p>\n World No 85 Ajla Tomljanovic lost to Hungary\u2019s 117th-ranked 7-6 (9-7) 6-4, while Kim Birrell also succumbed to Hungarian opposition in the shape of world No 78 Panna Udvardy 4-6 1-6 6-1.<\/p>\n It\u2019s now down to the Australian men in Madrid with Alex de Minaur, Alexei Popyrin and Adam Walton all ready for action in the main draw.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Daria Kasatkina\u2019s career in Australian colours has plummeted to a new low at the Madrid Open after she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-545654","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\/545654","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=545654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}