The exciting action should continue on day two at the WTA Portoroz Open with 12 intriguing first-round matches on the slate on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast.
After a miserable 2020 campaign, Rebecca Peterson has, to a degree, turned things around this year. The Swede arrives at the WTA Portoroz Open with a 17-16 record for the season that, whilst far from spectacular, is solid enough and her confidence has surely been boosted by a productive spell in the USA. However, she looks set to have her work cut out for her against Lucia Bronzetti, who is in the midst of a breakthrough season and has gone 48-18 this year, albeit playing mostly below WTA-level.
Her form has also tailed off of late. She lost in the first round of qualifying at the US Open to Valentini Grammatikopoulou and followed that with second-round defeats on clay in Prague and Karlsruhe. That was hardly the ideal preparation for this tournament, but she bounced back with two good wins in the qualifying over Fanny Stollar and Samantha Murray. Peterson is a cut above that opposition though and the Swede should have just about too much for Bronzetti.
Kristina Kucova will surely be in a confident mood. The Slovakian has a very impressive summer, reaching the final on clay at the WTA Gdynia Open, as well the quarterfinals in Cluj and the second round at the US Open as a lucky loser. Tereza Martincova posted a standout result of her own by reaching the final on home turf in Prague. But she offered little resistance to her compatriot Barbora Krejcikova there, losing 2-6 0-6 and she has struggled to stay fit since.
She was unable to finish matches in Montreal and Chicago, and the Czech also suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of Victoria Azarenka in the first round at the US Open. Martincova can expect to be rather more competitive here, however, and she may draw confidence from having beaten Kucova in their only previous hard-court meeting, which came in 2019 at the Australian Open. There was little between the pair that day and this may be similarly close. But Martincova’s game had more upside then and has more upside now.
