Osaka withdraws from Tokyo as Raducanu keeps winning in Seoul
WTA
Emma Raducanu and Naomi Osaka faced two different fortunes on Thursday in Asia as one of them advanced while the other one was forced to withdraw.
Both players were having a bad season, and they hoped to turn it around in Asia. While Raducanu signed up for the 2022 Korea Open in Seoul, Osaka competed in her home country at the 2022 Japan Open in Tokyo, and they both got through the first round.
The sixth-seeded Raducanu took on Yanina Wickmayer from Belgium for the spot in the quarter-finals in Seoul. Everything went well for the young British player early on.
In the first set, she converted her break point in the fifth game to gain an early lead in the match. Despite losing one break later, she added two more to eventually win the set 6-3 and enter the second one as the player with the upper hand.
And the 2021 US Open champion used the advantage to quickly break Wickmayer's serve again, and after slightly more than an hour, she led 6-3, 4-1 in Seoul.
Yet, her opponent fought back, and it seemed that the set would need to be decided in a tie-break. But Raducanu showed that she came to Seoul to win and broke her opponent's serve again in the twelfth game to win the match 6-3, 7-5, and set up a quarter-final clash with the third-seeded Magda Linette.
On the other hand, Osaka was supposed to take on the fifth-seeded Beatriz Haddad Maia in the second round of the tournament in Tokyo.
However, the four-time Grand Slam champion was forced to withdraw from the match because of illness. That means that Osaka spent only around nine minutes on the courts in Tokyo after her opponent, Daria Saville, retired already after one game in the first round.
