MADRID, 9 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish Garbiñe Muguruza and Paula Badosa will face the WTA Finals starting this Wednesday, the event that brings together the eight best of the 2021 season on the women’s circuit in the Mexican town of Guadalajara and that grants the symbolic title of ‘teacher’.
The Spanish-Venezuelan and the Catalan will try to put the best possible ending to a positive year for both and to which the second seems to arrive somewhat more animated, which has signed a good end of the campaign to get among the eight classified.
For more than two decades, women’s national tennis had two representatives at this event. Arancha Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez, Muguruza’s coach, were the last to achieve it there in 2000. Neither of them could win this title in their career and only the Barcelona woman could reach the final, in 1993, lost to the German Steffi Graff.
Now, the goal seems as affordable as it is complicated for Muguruza and Badosa. Women’s tennis has become an unpredictable point, but the absence of important names such as Ashleigh Barty, the last ‘teacher’ in 2019, Naomi Osaka or Simona Halep opens a good opportunity for the eight players, six of them debutants.
Only Muguruza, who is facing her fifth participation, and Czech Karolina Pliskova, number three in the world, know what it is to play this tournament. The one from Caracas will do it for the fourth time, with the semifinals as the best result in its first appearance in 2015, and after a year with ups and downs and with physical problems, but with four finals and two titles (Dubai and Chicago).
The double champion of ‘Grand Slam’ resigned to be with Spain in the Billie Jean King Cup in order to recover her sore ankle and to be more mentally fresh after a busy year, although her group, Teotihuacán, seems complicated by the presence the Czechs Barbora Krecjikova and Karolina Pliskova, second and third favorites, and the Estonian Anett Kontaveit.
Her debut this Wednesday against Pliskova, who dominates the balance of clashes 8-2, seems key, while Krejcikova was beaten this year in the final in Dubai, but then lost her other two games, with some tension in the US Open, and to Kontaveit, coming on a ten-game winning streak, he fell 6-1 a few weeks ago in his last game so far in Moscow.
BADOSA, TO GIVE HIM A GREAT PERFORMANCE FOR HER 24TH BIRTHDAY
For her part, Paula Badosa will make her debut in Guadalajara on Thursday in a ‘teachers’ tournament that she did not have at the beginning of a season where she has been demonstrating her greater maturity and tennis level and where she hopes to celebrate her 24 years in the best way that will be fulfilled next Sunday.
The Catalan arrives at the best moment of her career at this event. Installed for the first time among the top ten in the world, the Spanish has lived an exciting 2021 where she has been able to bring out her best tennis, solved in her first major title, that of Indian Wells (United States) in mid-October.
A mental reinforcement that makes him arrive with the illusion of fighting with the best and that has also meant giving up what would have been his debut with Spain in the Federation Cup. The Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, world number two and first favorite in Guadalajara, and the Polish Iga Swiatek has already won them this year at Cincinatti and Tokyo 2020 respectively, while she will play for the first time against the Greek Maria Sakkari, fourth member of the Group Chichen Itzá, where all four are debutants.