Regaining her ranking just 10 matches into her comeback will have real significance for the 2027 season.<\/p>\n
Kartal will no longer need to use a protected ranking to enter tournaments including the Australian Open, meaning she can have greater choice over when and where to play as she continues to manage her workload.<\/p>\n
“My goal on the Asian swing was just to try to defend those points I had from last year and make the use of the protected ranking worthwhile,” said Kartal, who also won two matches at the China Open in Beijing.<\/p>\n
“I think I’ve gone above and beyond that. The goal has been achieved this week and I’m in a good spot for the rest of the year and next year.”<\/p>\n
Kartal’s re-emergence is timely too when considering the bigger picture of British success at the highest level.<\/p>\n
With Kartal absent from three of the four majors, no British women went past the second round of a Grand Slam tournament in 2026.<\/p>\n
Kartal has only managed to do that twice in her career – reaching the third round at Wimbledon in 2024 and going one stage further last year – but showed in Wuhan she has the ability to thrive at elite level.<\/p>\n
She became the first British player to reach a WTA 1000 final since Johanna Konta in 2019 and, despite losing to 22nd-ranked Chwalinska, still recorded the best result by a British woman since Emma Raducanu won the US Open title in 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Regaining her ranking just 10 matches into her comeback will have real significance for the 2027 season. Kartal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":887497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-887496","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\/887496","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=887496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/887497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}