When Cirstea announced 2026 would be her farewell after a 20-year career, not even her dreams would have suggested the reality of how it has panned out.<\/p>\n
Announcing her retirement has led to playing with new-found freedom, as well as a feeling of having nothing left to prove.<\/p>\n
This liberated mindset has produced some of the best results of her career – particularly on clay where she has won 10 of her 12 matches so far.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, she became the oldest player to beat a world number one after taking out Aryna Sabalenka in the Rome third round.<\/p>\n
If Cirstea manages to beat Coco Gauff or Mirra Andreeva in the semi-finals, she will also break another notable barrier – finally cracking the world’s top 20.<\/p>\n
Having forged a solid career which has included four WTA titles and two Grand Slam quarter-finals, Cirstea has never gone higher than a peak of 21st – which came way back in 2013.<\/p>\n
Given she is playing some of the finest tennis of her career, it has prompted many people to ask whether she could reconsider her decision.<\/p>\n
Cirstea remains committed to hanging up her racquet, although she has added a caveat as her run in Rome continued.<\/p>\n
“Maybe if I win the tournament, I promise I’ll think about it,” she laughed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Cirstea announced 2026 would be her farewell after a 20-year career, not even her dreams would have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-580069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580069","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=580069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}