It’s hard to believe that Mirra Andreeva is still a teenager.<\/p>\n
Early last year she won Dubai as a 17-year-old, becoming the youngest WTA 1000 champion ever.<\/p>\n
She remained a fixture in the Top 10 as an 18-year-old, and on Wednesday she will turn 19.<\/p>\n
The World No. 8 is still one of the younger players on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, but she’s a bit spooked about getting older, she admitted after beating Leylah Fernandez in the Madrid quarterfinals on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“Obviously I’m very excited for tomorrow,” she said, “but at the same time I caught myself being a little bit sad. Because I don’t want to be old, and I don’t want to grow up. I want to just stay 18 and be a kid all the time. I feel like, obviously lately, time is going so fast, and I’m already going to turn 19.”<\/p>\n
Asked about how she’s changed since first turning pro in 2022, Andreeva said she’s still the same old Mirra, though she values alone time more than she used to.<\/p>\n
“Before, even after matches, I would want to spend some time with my family to talk a lot, or to do something together,” she said. “Now all I want to do is come back to the room and be alone, and just do something with myself — read a book, watch a TV series, just be on my phone. I don’t want to talk to people.<\/p>\n
“So maybe that’s how I’m changing. Other than that, I feel like I’m still the same Mirra that was here a couple of years ago.”<\/p>\n
Andreeva won’t have a match on her big day, hopefully giving her ample time to celebrate, but she’ll return to the court on Thursday for her semifinal match. She’ll play either World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka or 30th seed Hailey Baptiste. (Maybe she’ll sing Happy Birthday to herself<\/a> in her on-court interview if she wins. Fingers crossed.)<\/p>\n Prior to beating Fernandez, she picked up wins over Panna Udvardy, Dalma Galfi and Anna Bondar.\u00a0<\/p>\n She’s now 11-1 during the Clay-Court swing, and is looking for her third title of the season after winning Adelaide in January and Linz earlier this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s hard to believe that Mirra Andreeva is still a teenager. Early last year she won Dubai as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,1602,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-558550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558550","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=558550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}