Aryna Sabalenka competed in a Battle of the Sexes, and has been informed how she would fare towards a junior participant.
Aryna Sabalenka has been informed that she’d lose to the top-ranked junior boy (Picture: Getty)
Aryna Sabalenka has been probably the most in-form gamers of the yr, extending her lead on the high of the sport after she accomplished the Sunshine Double, profitable Indian Wells and Miami back-to-back. The world No. 1 sits nearly 3,000 rating factors away from No. 2 Elena Rybakina, and has not misplaced a match in additional than two months.
Sabalenka has already picked up three titles this yr, additionally profitable in Brisbane, and completed runner-up to Rybakina on the Australian Open. And she or he ready for the season in an uncommon method, going through Nick Kyrgios in a Battle of the Sexes, staged in Dubai on the finish of December. The world No. 1 suffered a 6-3 6-3 defeat to Kyrgios, who on the time was ranked outdoors of the highest 600 after some prolonged damage layoffs. He’s now unranked on account of inactivity.
And Patrick McEnroe, the previous doubles world No. 3 and brother of tennis legend John McEnroe, has now rubbed salt in Sabalenka’s wounds after that girl vs man match, claiming a 17-year-old boy would additionally be capable to beat her.
Throughout his Holding Court docket with Patrick McEnroe podcast, a referred to as requested McEnroe whether or not he thought he may beat the present finest girls’s tennis participant. “What would occur if the very best 15-year-old boys performed towards the highest WNBA crew?” he replied.
The caller recommended the boys would “beat them simply”. The 59-year-old continued: “It doesn’t matter to me as a result of it’s only a totally different sport. The brief reply is that I used to be a good professional as a journeyman kind participant, ranked most of my profession between 30 and 75, 100, no matter it was.
“However if you happen to took the highest junior participant on the planet, the highest 17-year-old and put him up towards Sabalenka, they beat her 6-1 6-1.”
Patrick McEnroe believes the ladies’s sport cannot be in comparison with the lads’s (Picture: Getty)
Nevertheless, the 1989 French Open doubles champion made it clear that he wasn’t attempting to place girls’s tennis down, and as a substitute thought it was tough to match the ladies’s sport with the lads’s. “However once more, to me, it’s irrelevant. I don’t say that to denigrate girls, as a result of I really like girls’s tennis,” he added.
“I’ll watch that if there’s an incredible matchup greater than I’ll watch a males’s blowout match. It’s only a completely totally different sport. And tennis for some cause, individuals do not have a look at it the identical method as a result of they see Madison Keys or Sabalenka hit their forehand as laborious as [Jannik] Sinner. Properly, they’re not hitting it with the identical spin and the motion is totally different. However anyway, that’s neither right here nor there.”
Within the present ITF boys junior rankings, Bulgarian 17-year-old Ivan Ivanov sits at No. 1. {The teenager} gained back-to-back junior Grand Slam titles final yr at Wimbledon and the US Open. He additionally has two ITF titles.
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