Sonay Kartal makes winning return to action at Limoges Challenger

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.

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.