Kartal was riding the crest of a wave in the early part of the season, having broken into the world’s top 50, reached two WTA quarter-finals and recorded wins over top-class opponents.<\/p>\n
Victories over 2025 Australian Open champion Madison Keys and former world number eight Emma Navarro in Indian Wells led to a meeting with now world number one Elena Rybakina in the fourth round.<\/p>\n
However, Kartal was forced to retire with a back injury that proved more serious than first thought.<\/p>\n
After initially hoping she would make a quick recovery, Kartal was left unable to brush her teeth without “being in agony”, leading to some difficult decisions.<\/p>\n
Missing Wimbledon was a particularly tough choice, especially given she reached the fourth round of her home Grand Slam in 2025, but resigning herself to not rushing a comeback has proved wise.<\/p>\n
Her first match back a little over three weeks ago – representing Great Britain at the BJK Cup – ended in a narrow defeat, before she won two matches to reach the Beijing third round in her WTA Tour return.<\/p>\n
“At the BJK Cup, the level I produced was much higher than I thought and I left super happy,” Kartal said.<\/p>\n
“Now I’m growing in confidence with every match I’m playing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kartal was riding the crest of a wave in the early part of the season, having broken into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804439","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\/804439","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=804439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}