“Already what I did last year was amazing and to be a champion here, I thought I deserved a wildcard and to get a little bit of respect.”<\/p>\n
In further comments to reporters, Maria added: “I did it last year. It was not five years ago.<\/p>\n
“I was surprised when I got the message of [tournament director] Laura Robson saying all the wildcards would go to the British players, which I understand. But as a champion, it’s tough for me.<\/p>\n
“It is something that should be normal. If you are champion of an event and you don’t get in the year after, I think automatically this should be considered.”<\/p>\n
Maria, watched by her two daughters, beat four top-20 players en route to the title, becoming the oldest winner of a WTA 500 tournament.<\/p>\n
She is ranked 52nd in the world – too low to earn direct entry for the 28-strong main draw but higher than each of the four British players awarded wildcards.<\/p>\n
This year’s recipients were Katie Boulter (world number 73), Fran Jones (98), Harriet Dart (160), and Mika Stojsavljevic (261).<\/p>\n
BBC Sport has contacted the LTA for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Already what I did last year was amazing and to be a champion here, I thought I deserved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-260262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}