Simona Halep Opens Up on Her Retirement During Rogers Cup 2019 Quarterfinal

The Wimbledon champion and reigning champion at Rogers Cup 2019, Simona Halep retired from her quarterfinal encounter due to an Achilles injury after she lost her first set against Marie Bouzkova.

The Romanian Number one tennis player, Simona Halep was unhappy with that decision of hers, but since the beginning of the tournament, her ankle was pestering her. Halep’s win in the quarterfinal would have set up a semifinal battle against Serena Williams.

“I felt the Achilles problems since the first match here. Today I felt it more, so that’s why I decided to retire. Tomorrow, it would have been Serena, and it is not easy,” Simona Halep said.

The fourth seed, Halep played an easy match against Svetlana Kuznetsova in her previous round, but her opening round match against the qualifier, Jennifer Brady wasn’t a cakewalk as the match was seesawing on both sides of the court. 

Last year, Simona Halep achieved a milestone during the North American Swing. She won the title in Montreal, later at Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati she surrendered in the finals to Kiki Bertens.

However, the Romanian’s presence at next week’s Cincinnati Open 2019 is undecisive. She aiming to recover to her fullest for the last Slam of the year at Flushing Meadows. It’s a highly likely situation that she would skip the Cincinnati event and fly to New York with a complete fit form.

Halep’s opponent last night, the 21-year-old, Marie Bouzkova has delivered her career-best performance on the WTA courts. The Czech has made it to the semifinals of a WTA Premier event for the very first time in her career and before this week she never played a main draw match at WTA Premier events. Bouzkova will now face Serena Willimas in the semifinals.

“Of course I’m disappointed that Simona had to retire today. As I said on the court, I really enjoyed playing against her, even if it was just for one set. It was a great experience, and now I’m looking forward to playing against Serena,” she said. “We had real long rallies. So maybe it was just something that she wanted to prevent going to the second set and going, you know, fighting more. So she was just scared, you know, to get it worse.”