Tatjana Maria won her second consecutive opening defeat on the WTA tour: The 30-year-old, one of the match winners of the Fed Cup surprise coup in Belarus, was clearly defeated by defending champion Timea Babos at the indoor tournament in Budapest.
After only 57 minutes, Hungarian local hero Babos turned her second match point into a clear 6-1,6-0 win over Maria. Last week, the German number four from Bad Saulgau had already failed in its opening round at the WTA hard court event in Doha. At that time, Maria had travelled directly from the exhausting quarter-final duel of the DTB team in Minsk (3:2) to Qatar and had obviously suffered from the strains. In the doubles match, the 30-year-old beat Belarus together with Anna-Lena Grönefeld (Nordhorn) scored the decisive third point and gave the outsider the semi-finals.
In Budapest, a possible German round of sixteen-finals has thus also failed. On Thursday, Mona Barthel (Neumünster) will meet Maria-Bezwinger Babos (No. 3), who won the Tournament in Taipei at the beginning of February. Barthel is the only remaining German starter in the field at the $250,000 Hungarian Ladies Open.
On Wednesday, in the round of the last 16 Sabine Lisicki was defeated by “Lucky Loser” Viktoria Kuzmova (Slovakia) with 2:6,4:6. At the start, former Wimbledon finalist Lisicki (Berlin) had eliminated French Pauline Parmentier after a chase to catch up with 0:6,6:4,6:2.
Already after the first match Carina Witthöft was finished. The 23-year-old from Hamburg, number 51 in the WTA ranking, lost surprisingly well against Jana Cepelova 2:6,2:6. The German number three only managed to win three of its eight service games. Slovakian qualifier Cepelova is ranked 114th in the world ranking.