{"id":659476,"date":"2026-06-26T14:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/659476\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T14:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:51:09","slug":"wimbledon-2026-wales-mimi-xu-to-face-daria-kasatkina-in-first-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/659476\/","title":{"rendered":"Wimbledon 2026: Wales&#8217; Mimi Xu to face Daria Kasatkina in first round"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Wales&#8217; Mimi Xu has been drawn to face Australia&#8217;s Daria Kasatkina in the first round of the women&#8217;s singles at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Xu has been handed a wildcard into the main draw for the second successive year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Swansea-born 18-year-old, who is ranked 327th in the world, was beaten by fellow Brit Emma Raducanu on debut in 2025.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She faces another tough test against 29-year-old Kasatkina, a former French Open semi-finalist.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The world number 68 is competing in the Wimbledon singles for the ninth time, with a run to the quarter-finals in 2018 her best performance at the All England Club.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Kasatkina, who previously represented Russia, has a career-best world ranking of eighth, which she achieved in 2022.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Xu and partner Alicia Dudeney have also received a wildcard for the women&#8217;s doubles, where they will face 2023 French Open doubles champions Hsieh Su-Wei and Wang Xinyu. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Su-Wei is a former world number one doubles player with nine Grand Slam titles, including five at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wimbledon.com\/en_GB\/draws\/ladies-singles\/1\" class=\"ssrcss-1fqyhkk-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Full women&#8217;s singles draw, external<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wales&#8217; Mimi Xu has been drawn to face Australia&#8217;s Daria Kasatkina in the first round of the women&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-659476","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\/659476","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=659476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}