- Sonay Kartal was defeated by Jessica Bouzas Maneiro in her debut at the Australian Open
- The British No. 3 expressed his frustration with the automatic call to the line during the confrontation.
Not many things went right for Sonay Kartal in her Australian Open debut. First he had to wait four hours for his match to start, then another 15 minutes for the water to stop seeping through the holes in the court.
She lost a point after a ball was called from a different court and was ultimately defeated by Spain's Jessica Bouzas Maneiro.
Melbourne was rain-soaked yesterday, so the British No. 3's match started in the afternoon instead of in the afternoon. Once the court staff finished cleaning up the water bubbling through the small holes in the surface, they set off.
There was a curious incident in the second game of the match that illustrated a disadvantage of fully automated line calls. Bouzas Maneiro performed a serve near the line and both she and Kartal thought it had been called, before realizing that the call had actually come from the disembodied voice on the adjacent court, rather than their own.
“It's one of the hardest things I find not having linesmen,” Kartal said. “(The robocalls) all sound the same.”
Kartal was outclassed here by the world number 54, losing 6-1, 7-6. “Disappointed with the result and quite disappointed with the performance as well,” Kartal said. “It was definitely a far cry from how I expected him to play.
Sonay Kartal was defeated by the Spanish Jessica Bouzas Maneiro in her debut at the Australian Open
The first round clash included a curious incident that occurred as a result of a fully automated line call.
But you have to give her credit because she came out firing in that first set. It was complicated, in some ways she plays very similar to me: forehand with spin, she gets a good hit with the ball. It was difficult to play someone like me.”
Kartal said before the tournament that he is looking to add more aggressive equipment to his game, which relies on groundstrokes with twists and turns.
If you wanted an example of how he intends to play, you could do much worse than rewatch Bouzas Maneiro's performance in the first set, full of fire and power.
“When you play against someone like that, if you stay that far back from the baseline, you give him every angle,” he said. “So looking back, I definitely could have been closer to the line and it would have given me a better chance.”
“I need to get better at switching between the two: the more aggressive forehand and the more spinning one.”
A losing start to the Australian Open for the British contingent, then, but there were six players left to run: Jodie Burrage and Jack Draper overnight, Jacob Fearnley in the morning; Emma Raducanu, Katie Boulter and Cam Norrie on Tuesday.