The Spaniard needed to beat Barbora Krejcikova on Friday night to stay in contention for a spot in the final four in Guadalajara—and she came through.

Having (narrowly) lost her first round-robin match of the tournament to Karolina Pliskova two nights ago, Garbine Muguruza needed to win against Barbora Krejcikova on Friday night to keep her semifinal hopes alive at the WTA Finals in Guadalajara.

And win she did, battling to a 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory over the Czech.

“Well that was a very tough match,” Muguruza said in her on-court interview.

“It was amazing. The crowd helped me so much during the second set to come back. I didn’t start the match very well, so in the second set I had to push myself and fight with whatever tennis I had today, and I was playing so much better in the third set.”

There was a clear improvement from Muguruza throughout the match. Her game went awry in the first set, producing 2 winners to 18 unforced errors—but once that set was out of the way things shifted, as the Spaniard was almost even the rest of the match, hitting 19 winners to 22 unforced errors across the next two sets.

She snuck out the only break of the third set to go up 2-1 and never let it go, as the two players held from there until it was all over after two hours and 10 minutes.

The No. 5-ranked Muguruza, who’s back in the Top 5 for the first time since 2018, was asked how it feels to be back at this stage again with the best of the best.

“It was a tough journey, and sometimes there are ups and downs, but I work hard,” she said. “I have an excellent team that helped me to be back in the top.”

Muguruza’s win over the No. 3-ranked Krejcikova was her 13th career win over a Top 5 player, and her first win over someone in the Top 3 since she defeated a No. 3-ranked Simona Halep in the semifinals of the 2020 Australian Open.

Perhaps more relevantly to this week, it keeps her in contention for a spot in the semifinals of the WTA Finals. Anett Kontaveit already secured her spot in the final four with her 6-4, 6-0 win over Pliskova earlier in the day—on Sunday, Muguruza (1-1) will play Kontaveit (2-0) and Krejcikova (0-2) will play Pliskova (1-1) in the last wave of round-robin matches from the Teotihuacan Group, and one of Krejcikova, Pliskova and Muguruza will join Kontaveit in the final four, depending on the results.

Even Krejcikova still has a shot at advancing if there ends up being a three-way tie at 1-2 and she comes out on top after the tiebreaker rules.

Garbine Muguruza has expressed her awe and inspiration after observing Elina Svitolina’s intense training session from close quarters.

Svitolina recently stunned world No. 1 Iga Swiatek by a 7-5, 6-7(5), 6-2 scoreline to reach the Wimbledon 2023 semifinals. It was the Ukranian’s second semifinal appearance at the grasscourt Major and it came less than nine months after she gave birth to a baby girl.

Svitolina then faced unseeded and eventual champion Marketa Vondrousova in the semifinals, losing 6-3 6-3 in just an hour and 14 minutes.

Former World No. 1 Garbine Muguruza, meanwhile, has won two Grand Slam singles titles – the 2016 French Open and the 2017 Wimbledon Championships.

Muguruza recently shared a story on her Instagram about watching Svitolina in an intense training session. Svitolina also shared Muguruza’s story on her Instagram with two smiley emoji.

Former Wimbledon champion Garbine Muguruza says she will take an extended break from tennis until the summer.

The 29-year-old, who has dropped to 132nd in the world, said she will miss the clay and grass-court seasons.

“Spending time with family and friends and it’s really been healthy and amazing, so I am going to lengthen this period till summer,” Muguruza added.

She reached the top of the rankings in 2017, and was third at the end of 2021, but did not pass the quarter-finals of a tournament last year.

Muguruza won her maiden Grand Slam title at the French Open in 2016 and claimed the Wimbledon title a year later.

Meanwhile, at the Charleston Open in South Carolina, former world number three Elina Svitolina fell just short of a win in her first match since giving birth to her daughter in October.

The Ukrainian, 28, lost 6-7 (3-7) 6-2 6-4 in two hours and 46 minutes to Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan but told the Tennis Channel that she was pleased with her performance.

“I had goosebumps,” she said. “It was a really, really sweet atmosphere out there. It was so nice to see many people, and they were really cheering me on to push through some tough moments.

“It was not easy physically for me today, but in the end, I’m really happy with the way I played. Now, I can see more clear what I need to improve to be better.

“I think I’m hitting the ball well. I just have to work more on my fitness. I think a few bits here and there are going to help me to keep the focus more consistently, to be there in the moment.”

“I think it’s going to be very difficult to find a real truth and for her to be able to talk freely” – Spanish world number three Garbine Muguruza is unsure whether the truth will eve be known over what happened to Peng Shuai as headlines around the world move on from the Chinese star’s disappearance from public life and subsequent reappearance three weeks later.

But her post was deleted and censored before she disappeared from public. She reappeared three weeks but doubts remain over how free she really is.

And world number three Muguruza believes the world may never know the truth under the circumstances

“Are we going to know something about this? I don’t know, I think it’s a complicated country to deal with,” Muguruza told reporters ahead of the Australian Open, where Peng will be absent.

Garbine Muguruza has lamented her pattern of fading away in the final set of matches, the two-time major winner struggling in Melbourne’s extreme heat on Tuesday and exiting the Australian Open early.

Muguruza described her 3-6, 7-6 (7-3), 6-1 loss to seeded Belgian Elise Mertens, before the Open’s extreme heat policy came into play, as “really tough”.

Garbine Muguruza reveals her mindset is “to keep it calm, simple and humble” as she is hoping to find a way out of her major slump. Muguruza, a two-time Grand Slam champion, finished the 2021 season by winning the WTA Finals.

After going just 12-17 in 2022, Muguruza also started her 2023 season with a 0-4 record. “I’ve had so many moments in my career where I’ve been so high, and other moments when I’ve not been so high.

It’s a process of trying to get back up there. Now I’m focusing on training hard and being humble. You have to know that maybe you haven’t had the success recently as you had in other years, but that’s fine because things can change very quickly.

With tennis, one week it can go wrong, then next week it can go well, then everything changes again. I think experience helps me to stay calm in the not-so-good moments when I haven’t been playing as well or results haven’t followed,” Muguruza said,

Muguruza: I have to keep it calm and more simple

“I feel that this year it’s more about keeping it calm and more simple. Last year I put myself under a lot of pressure, telling myself to keep going to stay at the top all the time.

That definitely didn’t help me, and it was a bit of a struggle. This year, yes ranking is important – I’ve been at every possible ranking – but that is not my priority anymore. Now it’s about enjoying my time on court and taking the trophies back home, then we’ll see what the ranking is,” Muguruza added.

This week, Muguruza is competing at a WTA 500 event in Abu Dhabi. In the Abu Dhabi first round, Muguruza plays former world No 1 Karolina Pliskova. Muguruza is experiencing one of the most challenging periods of her career and she could benefit a lot from just one great result.

The former Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza has become the latest high-profile woman to walk away from tennis, further depleting a tour which is already starved of star power.

In an Instagram post, Muguruza said that she was “spending time with family and friends” before adding that “I am going to lengthen this period till summer, therefore I am going to miss clay and grass season”.

While Muguruza’s post implies that she should be back for the autumn, there is no firm commitment. Like Ashleigh Barty – another Wimbledon champion who retired suddenly a year ago – she appears to have lost her enthusiasm for the tennis carousel.

At 29, Muguruza is two-and-a-half years older than Barty, and has more miles on the clock. She is closer in age to 31-year-old Simona Halep – another Wimbledon champion – who hasn’t played since testing positive for a banned substance at last year’s US Open. It’s understood that Halep is still several weeks away from being ready to bring her defence to a tribunal.

Another big name who has been absent since September is 25-year-old Naomi Osaka, a four-time major champion on hard courts. In Osaka’s case, she is taking maternity leave in preparation for the birth of her first child, and has insisted that she is keen to return to professional tennis in the future. And yet, as with Muguruza, Osaka has not always given the impression of enjoying the touring life.

With Serena Williams having retired last year, and Venus Williams a very occasional visitor, the WTA Tour is now dominated by Eastern European women. This season, the trio of Poland’s Iga Swiatek, Belarus’s Aryna Sabalenka and Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina have been the most effective performers, although the Czech Republic’s Petra Kvitova – yet another Wimbledon champion – beat Rybakina in Sunday’s final of the Miami Open.

Given that tennis’s commercial pull is hugely reliant on star names and reliable rivalries, you can see how the absence of so many potential draw cards is hurting the WTA’s balance sheet. In fact, the WTA board recently sold off a 20 per cent stake in the tour’s commercial operations to private equity firm CVC, in an attempt to balance the books.

With the exception of Romania’s Halep, the other women mentioned above all hail from relatively large markets: Muguruza from Spain, Barty from Australia, Osaka from Japan and the Williams sisters from the United States. It is an unfortunate reality that these nations offer more commercial opportunities than the former Eastern bloc.

In Muguruza’s case, she has suffered a prolonged form slump that dates back to her last tournament win – which came at the WTA Finals in Guadalajara 17 months ago. She delivered a career-worst season in 2022, registering only 12 wins alongside 17 defeats, and has lost all four matches that she contested this year.

As a result, Muguruza’s ranking has slumped to No 132 in the world – her lowest figure since she was a dynamic 18-year-old. This has left her unable to earn direct entry to most WTA events. But as a two-time slam champion – who won Wimbledon in 2017 and the French Open the previous year – she could surely have asked for wild cards (tennis jargon for discretional invitations) if she had wanted to play.

Muguruza and Barty have earned very similar sums in prizemoney – around £20 million and £19 million respectively – and they both cashed in at the WTA Finals, with Barty landing a world-record £3.5 million payday in Shenzhen in 2019.

Increasingly, it seems as if the ever-increasing pay-packets available on the WTA Tour – which will soon be further boosted by the involvement of CVC – are equating to shorter careers rather than longer ones.

Anecdotally, women are said to find professional tennis a lonelier lifestyle than men. This argument was first advanced in John Feinstein’s seminal book 1991 Hard Courts, in which Martina Navratilova’s coach Mike Estep said “When I played, we all tried like hell to beat one another but then went out for dinner or a beer at night. That doesn’t happen on the women’s tour. They’re all friendly to one another in the locker-room, but once they leave the locker-room, they almost always stick to themselves.”

This diagnosis has changed little over the past 30 years. Several ways of making tennis more congenial for female players have been discussed, including more women in support staffs and more team events. But the WTA tour – which echoes the ATP model that evolved piecemeal in the 1960s and 70s – shows little sign of changing.

Former world No 1 Garbine Muguruza is set to leave the top-100 this month. Muguruza, who reached the world No 1 spot for the first time in 2017, is currently ranked at No 83 in the world. After starting the season with a 0-4 record, Muguruza pulled out late from this week’s WTA event in Abu Dhabi due to personal reasons.

Shortly after withdrawing from Abu Dhabi, Muguruza also withdrew from a WTA 500 event in Doha and a WTA 1000 event Dubai – where she was scheduled to play in the qualifying events. Last year, Muguruza made the Doha quarterfinal and Dubai round-of-16, respectively.

Because she won’t defend those points, Muguruza will soon be exiting the top-100.

Muguruza on her slump

In late 2021, Muguruza won the WTA Finals and looked very strong going into 2022. But since winning the 2021 WTA Finals, Muguruza has been struggling a lot with her form and results.

Now I’m focusing on training hard and being humble. You have to know that maybe you haven’t had the success recently as you had in other years, but that’s fine because things can change very quickly. With tennis, one week it can go wrong, then next week it can go well, then everything changes again.

I think experience helps me to stay calm in the not-so-good moments when I haven’t been playing as well or results haven’t followed. I feel that this year it’s more about keeping it calm and more simple. Last year I put myself under a lot of pressure, telling myself to keep going to stay at the top all the time.

That definitely didn’t help me, and it was a bit of a struggle. This year, yes ranking is important – I’ve been at every possible ranking – but that is not my priority anymore. Now it’s about enjoying my time on court and taking the trophies back home, then we’ll see what the ranking is,” Muguruza said.

Former world No 1 Garbine Muguruza has announced that she will miss the entire clay and grass seasons. Muguruza, 29, hasn’t played since suffering a Lyon first-round defeat to Linda Noskova on January 30th. In January, Muguruza suffered four first-round exits and she owns a 0-4 record in 2023.

After Lyon, Muguruza pulled out of Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai. Now, Muguruza reveals she has been spending time with her family and friends and getting herself in the right mental space. “Spending time with family and friends and it’s really been healthy and amazing so I am going to lengthen this period till summer.

Therefore I’m going to miss the clay and gras season. Thanks for all the lovely messages and will be updating you guys,” Muguruza said in a message posted on her Instagram Story.

Muguruza hit a rough stretch

After concluding her 2021 season by winning the WTA Finals, Muguruza was hoping to have a great 2022 season.

But the 2022 season was everything but a great season for Muguruza, who went 12-17 in 2022. After a rough 2022 season, Muguruza also started the 2023 season in an unimpressive way. Muguruza, a two-time Grand Slam champion, told The National in early February that she was humbled by her results.

“With tennis, one week it can go wrong, then next week it can go well, then everything changes again. I think experience helps me to stay calm in the not-so-good moments when I haven’t been playing as well or results haven’t followed.

That’s where the experience comes in; to stay calm and keep working hard. And if you have to be a little more humble, that’s good too. It’s really a rollercoaster, the athlete’s career,” Muguruza told The National before taking a break from tennis.

With Muguruza out through the grass season, we could see the former world No 1 back in action as soon as during the North American hard court swing.