Sonay Kartal makes winning return to action at Limoges Challenger

Monday, 08 December 2025 at 18:30

Sonay Kartal continues her epic Wimbledon run.

Sonay Kartal has made a winning return to action on Monday at the Limoges Challenger taking down Jessica Pieri in France to open her account.

Kartal won through 6-1, 6-0 in the WTA 125 and had 65% on her first serve. She is the fourth seed this week with Cristina Bucsa, Elsa Jacquemot, Barbora Krejcikova ahead of her as the latter two-time Grand Slam champion aims to begin her road back to her best by playing smaller level tennis in the off season.

A year ago, she was playing in the WTA Finals in Riyadh having scooped the Wimbledon title but it has been a much more arduous road this time around as she is now playing 125k challengers in France to try and get back to her bst after a ranking drop following a catalogue of injury issues.

Kartal hasn't played since October and now sits in World No.69 albeit given the fine margins she has room to grow this week. She has a best of World No.44 and had a great fourth round run at Wimbledon earlier this summer but British women's tennis has faced a bit of a crisis as of late.

Boulter not in France despite decision to make

Katie Boulter was rumoured to be playing this week but seems not to be doing so attending Christmas parties hosted by Laura Robson which seemed to make up her mind. She said herself she was weighing up playing because the issue she has more than Kartal is that the ranking cut off is this month and not immediately when the season is over so she keeps dropping week on week and likely has to play Australian Open qualifying.

But having got injured earlier this Autumn, Boulter was facing a dilemma of whether to play and risk further injury or have to go through likely qualifying. She has seemingly chosen the latter after it was Kartal, Raducanu and Boulter all vying for that British No.1 spot earlier this year.

Currently it is only Raducanu winning that race, albeit she has had to pull out of recent exhibition matches due precautionary to injury. She will return in the first week of January and plays United Cup.

But with Jack Draper also injured for most of this year, it has not been the year for the top British talents. Albeit Kartal will hope to turn a corner this week and what better prep for the next year than playing a tournament in an off season that gets shorter and shorter especially if you are lower ranked and are chasing points towards Australia.

Who is playing in Limoges?

Player	Nationality / Notes
Cristina Bucșa	ESP
Elsa Jacquemot	FRA
Barbora Krejčíková	CZE
Sonay Kartal	GBR
Alycia Parks	USA
Antonia Ružić	CRO
Zhang Shuai	CHN
Victoria Jiménez Kasintseva	AND
Fiona Ferro	FRA (Wild Card)
Tiphanie Lemaître	FRA (Wild Card)
Chloé Paquet	FRA (Wild Card)
Mingge Xu	GBR / FRA (Wild Card)
Océane Dodin	FRA (Protected Ranking)
Mona Barthel	GER (Qualifier)
Marina Bassols Ribera	ESP (Qualifier)
Anna Sisková	CZE (Qualifier)
Eva Vedder	NED (Qualifier)
Kathinka von Deichmann	LIE (Replacement)
Alina Charaeva	RUS (Replacement)
Tamara Korpatsch	GER (Replacement)
Jessika Ponchet	FRA (Replacement)
Jessica Pieri	ITA (Replacement)
Anhelina Kalinina	UKR (Replacement)
Manon Léonard	FRA (Replacement)
Teodora Kostović	SRB (Replacement)

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GOOD START!!!!🔥🔥 Sonay Kartal🇬🇧 gets off to the best possible start at WTA 125 Limoges after she only loses one game against Jessica Pieri🇮🇹 6-1 6-0 to move into the second round👏🏼👏🏼 Great to see Sonay playing some amazing tennis again🇬🇧💪🏼 📸@the_LTA

11:27 AM · Dec 8, 2025

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