Sonay Kartal was two games from losing the opening set of her Wuhan Open first round. Twenty-five minutes later she was serving for the match. The 24-year-old from Brighton, ranked 170th in the world after six months out with a stress fracture in her back, beat Ukraine’s Anhelina Kalinina 7-5 6-3 in one hour and 31 minutes on Monday to reach the second round of a WTA 1000 event — her second top-50 scalp in a fortnight.
Kalinina, the world No. 48, led 5-2 and had two opportunities to serve out the first set. She won two more games all afternoon.
Five games in a row flip the match
The turnaround was built on serve. Kartal landed 89% of her first deliveries (54 of 61), hit four aces to Kalinina’s none and did not serve a double fault; Kalinina served five. From 2-5 down, Kartal reeled off five consecutive games to take the set 7-5, and in the second she conceded just four points behind her first serve.
Kalinina, by contrast, could not hold the baseline exchanges together. She won 58% of her first-serve points to Kartal’s 70%, and in the second set managed only four points from 15 first serves. Kartal broke at the third attempt for 4-2, then served out at the third time of asking after Kalinina saved two match points.
The headline numbers were less emphatic than the scoreline: Kartal converted only four of 10 break points and held nine of her 11 service games. But she won 42% of return points against a player who has spent most of the past four years inside the top 60, and she did it from a position that would have been easy to surrender.
A ranking collapse, and the climb back
Kartal’s position at No. 170 bears no relation to the player she was 15 months ago. She reached a career-high No. 44 on 14 July 2025, days after the best run of her career: a fourth round at Wimbledon that included a win over 20th seed Jelena Ostapenko before Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova stopped her. Her maiden WTA title had come in Tunis at the Jasmin Open in September 2024, the win over Rebecca Sramkova that first carried her into the top 100.
Then came Indian Wells in March, a lower-back injury that was diagnosed as a stress fracture, and a season that disappeared. She withdrew from Miami, missed the French Open, missed Wimbledon — the tournament that made her name — and sat out the North American hard-court swing. Ranking points earned in 2025 fell off week by week with nothing to replace them.
Her return has been brisker than anyone had reason to expect. She came back at the Billie Jean King Cup Finals in September, losing to the then-world No. 26 Marie Bouzkova. At the China Open she won two matches, beating Spain’s Andrea Lazaro Garcia and then 31st seed Wang Xinyu 6-3 6-2, winning 55% of her return points against the home favourite before losing to Alina Charaeva in the third round.
Kalinina is a meaningful marker on that curve. The 29-year-old reached No. 25 in May 2023, and in March this year became the first player to reach three consecutive WTA 125 finals in three consecutive weeks, winning two of them. She is not a drifting seed; she is a tour-hardened opponent who had to be beaten rather than waited out.
Bencic next, with the hard part ahead
Kartal’s reward is ninth seed Belinda Bencic, the Olympic champion, who moved into this quarter of the draw with a bye after world No. 6 Linda Noskova withdrew on the eve of the tournament with a left calf injury. It will be a first meeting between the two, and the clearest test yet of how much match sharpness Kartal has recovered rather than merely how much movement.
British interest elsewhere in Wuhan was short-lived, with Katie Boulter beaten by 11th seed Diana Shnaider.
The wider point is about arithmetic. WTA 1000 main-draw wins are the fastest way back up a ranking list, and Kartal has now collected three of them in China inside two weeks. A player at No. 170 faces a brutal 2027 schedule — qualifying draws, 125-level events, limited access to the tournaments where the points are — unless the protected and earned ranking combine to open doors. Every round she survives this autumn reduces how much of that grind she has to do.
She has lost nothing of the quality that took her to No. 44. What she lost was six months, and she is making them back quickly.
**Sources:** [LTA](https://www.lta.org.uk/news/2026/october/wuhan-open-2026-sonay-kartal-through-to-face-ninth-seed-belinda-bencic-in-second-round/) · [Yahoo Sports](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/fit-again-kartal-takes-top-063338591.html) · [Tennis.com match stats](https://www.tennis.com/tournaments/dongfeng-voyah-wuhan-open/matches/a-kalinina-vs-s-kartal-2026-10-12) · [WTA (Noskova withdrawal)](https://www.wtatennis.com/news/4590448/linda-noskova-pulls-out-of-wuhan-with-left-calf-injury) · [Wikipedia – Kartal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonay_Kartal) · [Wikipedia – Kalinina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhelina_Kalinina) · [LTA (China Open)](https://www.lta.org.uk/news/2026/october/china-open-sonay-kartal-eases-past-31st-seed-to-reach-third-round-in-beijing/)
One note on a conflict in the sources: Yahoo lists Kartal as British No. 5, Wikipedia as British No. 3, so I left the domestic ranking out and used only her world ranking (No. 170), which every source agrees on. The “protected and earned ranking” line in the closing paragraph is my inference about her 2027 scheduling, not a sourced fact — cut it if you want the piece purely reportorial.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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