Boulter has struggled on clay throughout her career, only winning her first WTA-Tour level match on the surface in 2025. <\/p>\n
Despite winning just four clay-court matches across five tournaments this season, Boulter feels like she is making positive steps.<\/p>\n
“I have to keep reminding myself that I got my first win on clay last year and I’m here now testing some of the better players on a clay court and that is important to me,” Boulter told BBC Radio 5 Live.<\/p>\n
“I’m taking the steps towards where I feel like I need to be on a clay court. It’s taking time but I do think that today was one of the better matches I’ve played.<\/p>\n
“I think I found my identity really well on the court and I just went after it. I started to commit to my shots and see where I was winning points and start gravitating towards that more.”<\/p>\n
Frustratingly, it was not her groundstrokes or being outfoxed by the conditions which cost her against Potapova, but her serve. <\/p>\n
Boulter hit 10 double faults to just one ace, her first-serve percentage down at 54% and she only won 36% of points behind her second serve, while only 16 of her 51 unforced errors were groundstrokes.<\/p>\n
“I’ve hit a couple of double faults in big moments but, at the same time, I think I’m also trying to improve my serve,” she said in her main press conference.<\/p>\n
“I’m not necessarily holding back, and I’m not just trying to push the ball in the court and run.<\/p>\n
“I’m pleased with the way it’s going towards my goals. It’s a work in progress. It’s going to be good days and bad days. I think I’m pretty level-headed about it.”<\/p>\n
Boulter has been struggling to shake off an illness in recent days and, moving forward, she said her “number one priority” is returning to full fitness for the upcoming grass-court tournaments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boulter has struggled on clay throughout her career, only winning her first WTA-Tour level match on the surface…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-671399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}