It will be a special day tomorrow for three young New Zealand women as they take the court in the first round of qualifying for the ASB Classic. For two of them it will be the first time that they’ve played a match on the WTA tour. For the third, Valentina Ivanov, it marks a return to the stage where she played the biggest match of her life when facing Jil Teichmann in 2020. Ivanov has been drawn against 11th seed Yang Ya-yi from Taiwan, who is ranked 210. Elyse Tse has been unfortunate enough to draw the top seed, Brenda Fruhvirtova from the Czech Republic, while Jade Otway will face ninth seed Carole Monnet from France.
There will also be plenty of New Zealand interest in another of the players on show, with Lulu Sun making her first appearance at the ASB Classic. She had a good enough year to be safely inside the qualifying draw for the Australian Open, and it would be nice if she could get some extra points here to start the New Year. Her opponent is the Australian 10th seed, Destanee Aiava, who is ranked just five places higher.
Unfortunately there’s no order of play available yet, with the only certainty being that play will start at 11 am. Anyone looking at weather cameras in Auckland at the moment would seriously doubt that there will be any play outdoors tomorrow, because the rain has been teeming down all afternoon, but it’s due to clear over the next few hours, with just a couple of scattered showers in the morning as we head to a daytime high of between 27 and 30 degrees.