In December, Sorana Cirstea announced that the 2026 season — her 20th on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz — would be her last. In an emotional Instagram post, the 36-year-old Romanian announced her impending retirement, and said that she hoped to go out “on a high note and on [her] terms.”<\/p>\n
Rome:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n On Saturday in Rome, she might’ve reached the highest note a professional player can — a stunning 2-6, 6-3, 7-5 triumph over World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the third round of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia.<\/p>\n In two decades on tour, Cirstea had scored 24 career Top 20 wins — a whopping total for a player who never cracked the Top 20 in the PIF WTA Rankings herself. But none of those came against a player ranked World No. 1. In fact, Cirstea had never won a set in six prior matches against a top-ranked opponent — including a 6-3, 6-3 loss to Sabalenka at the Brisbane International in January.\u00a0<\/p>\n And at 6-2, 2-0 for Sabalenka, it seemed like that trend would continue for Cirstea.<\/p>\n Until it didn’t.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sabalenka’s level dipped, and the veteran had the experience to take advantage. She eventually completed the comeback in 2 hours and 14 minutes, breaking Sabalenka three times in the final set. The top seed also required a medical timeout for what appeared to be a lower-back injury midway through the decider.<\/p>\n The defeat, just Sabalebka’s third loss to anyone this season, marks her earliest exit from a tournament in more than a year. She last lost before the quarterfinals at the 2025 Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, where she was beaten by Clara Tauson.<\/p>\n More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In December, Sorana Cirstea announced that the 2026 season — her 20th on the WTA Tour Driven by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[27,4125],"class_list":{"0":"post-14478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rome","8":"tag-rome","9":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}