Sonay Kartal marked the end of a six-month injury absence with a 6-2, 6-3 win over Spain’s Andrea Lazaro Garcia in the first round of the China Open in Beijing on Thursday, the British number two’s first victory on the WTA Tour since March.
Kartal, ranked 129th and playing only her second tournament since suffering a back injury at Indian Wells, broke the Spanish qualifier’s serve five times and landed 69% of her first serves. Lazaro Garcia, ranked 137th, never held a lead in either set.
It was a controlled, unfussy performance from a player who spent the summer watching rather than competing — and who, at 24, is now rebuilding a ranking that stood at a career-high 44 in July 2025.
From Indian Wells to Beijing
Kartal’s 2026 had started well. She reached quarter-finals in Auckland and Abu Dhabi, then beat Madison Keys and Emma Navarro at Indian Wells — two of the better wins of her career — before a stress fracture in her back ended her season in March.
The layoff cost her three of the four Grand Slams, including Wimbledon, where she had reached the fourth round in 2025. She did not play again until last week’s Billie Jean King Cup Finals in Shenzhen, where she pushed world number 26 Marie Bouzkova to 7-6(2), 4-6, 6-4 across roughly three hours before Great Britain were beaten 2-0 by Czechia, Linda Noskova seeing off Katie Boulter in the second singles.
Kartal has described that match as the right way to come back. “For me, there was no better way to do it,” she said before this week’s event in Beijing. “I’m feeling good. Mentally, physically, I’m in a very good place. I’m ready to get going now.”
She was candid about how slowly the rehabilitation moved at first. “The first three months were slow,” she said. “Then, all of a sudden, I really started to rocket upwards.”
What the absence actually cost
The damage was not only physical. Ranking points from a player’s best results fall off the year after they are earned, and almost all of Kartal’s 2025 points came in the second half of the season — the Wimbledon run above all.
Her breakthrough fortnight at SW19 took in wins over 18th seed Jelena Ostapenko, Viktoriya Tomova and Diane Parry before Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova beat her 7-6(3), 6-4 in the last 16. She became the fourth unseeded British woman to reach the Wimbledon fourth round this century, after Laura Robson in 2013, Emma Raducanu in 2021 and 2024, and Heather Watson in 2022.
Missing the defence of those points while injured is why a player who was 44th in the world 15 months ago is now outside the top 125, and why she needed a protected ranking to get into the main draw of a WTA 1000 at all. The practical effect is stark:
- Ranked inside the top 50, she was seeded at tour level and entered the biggest events automatically.
- Ranked 129th, she faces qualifying at most WTA 1000 and 500 events, and lower-tier ITF weeks to accumulate points.
- Protected ranking entries are finite — a limited number of tournaments, used within a fixed window.
Beijing is one of those entries, which is part of what made Thursday’s win matter beyond the scoreline. “Missing three of the four Slams was incredibly tough,” Kartal said. “Missing a home Slam was incredibly tough.”
Wang Xinyu next
Kartal’s reward is a second-round meeting with China’s Wang Xinyu, the 31st seed, who will have home support at the National Tennis Center. It is a significant step up: Wang is a top-40 player on hard courts and has the first-strike game to take the initiative Kartal was allowed to hold against Lazaro Garcia.
Boulter also advanced on Thursday, beating Japanese qualifier Mai Hontama 6-3, 6-4, while Harriet Dart came through qualifying to reach the main draw. The China Open, a WTA 1000 event, runs until 11 October.
For Kartal, the Asian swing is less about a deep run than about accumulating matches before the off-season, when a full pre-season — her first in two years without rehabilitation built into it — becomes the real target. She has drawn a line under the first nine months of 2026.
“I think I’ve put the start of the year to one side and I’m starting fresh from now,” she said. “It’s made me a stronger person, a better person and hopefully it will make me a better tennis player.”
Sources: [Yahoo Sports match report](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/sonay-kartal-ends-six-month-073756059.html), [LTA: Kartal “feeling good” after injury spell](https://www.lta.org.uk/news/2026/september/british-tennis-star-sonay-kartal-feeling-good-and-starting-afresh-after-injury-spell/), [LTA: China Open 2026 draws](https://www.lta.org.uk/news/2026/september/china-open-2026-draws-announced-for-katie-boulter-sonay-kartal-harriet-dart/), [LTA: Wimbledon 2025 fourth round](https://www.lta.org.uk/fan-zone/wimbledon-championships/news/2025-sonay-kartals-run-comes-to-an-end-in-fourth-round-defeat-to-anastasia-pavlyuchenkova/), [Billie Jean King Cup Finals 2026: GB v Czechia](https://www.lta.org.uk/fan-zone/gb-teams/billie-jean-king-cup/news/2026/finals-great-britain-vs-czechia-results-updates/)
Two notes on sourcing: the pre-tournament LTA draw preview listed Kartal’s projected second-round opponent as 10th seed Iva Jovic, but same-day match reports and the published draw have Wang Xinyu — I went with the latter. The protected-ranking entry is reported in secondary coverage rather than confirmed by the LTA directly; the sentence can be cut if you want to be strict. Article is 723 words.
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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