Sorana Cirstea announced her retirement from tennis at the end of last year. Since the announcement, the overriding question has been simple: why? Based on what she has produced in what is to be her last season on tour, one wonders if the decision isn’t decisively premature. Since making that announcement, she has been playing some of the most consistent, liberated tennis of her life, and the milestones are racking up, and doing so expeditiously.<\/p>\n
This season has seen her unleash herself in a way she never has in the two decades her career has spanned. There’s been a title in her home country of Romania. In Rome, she beat world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> for the first time, marking the first time Cirstea has beaten a No. 1 in her career. Cirstea also made the semifinals of the Rome Masters, eventually losing to Coco Gauff after a fairytale run.<\/p>\n She has carried that momentum into the French Open, where she has reached the round of 16 and is yet to drop a single set. Her third round match saw her hand her opponent a double bagel, becoming the oldest player to do so in the Open Era, breaking the previous record set by Victoria Azarenka just a year ago. Earlier this month, this stellar season culminated in Cirstea breaking into the top 20 of the WTA rankings for the first time in her career.<\/p>\n It feels as though the decision to retire has unleashed something in her or has taken the pressure off, allowing her to swing freely, with a nothing-to-lose mentality. Whatever the case, her continued exploits have put her under new pressure, one she didn’t think she would face when she announced she was calling it a day. Her strong run of form has raised questions about her decision to retire, with pressure mounting on her to stay on a bit longer.<\/p>\n Following her stunning display against Sabalenka in Rome, she admitted as much<\/a>, saying: “everyone’s been telling me, come on, you cannot retire this year, you know. So it’s making my decision a little bit harder. But I said, okay, if I get to top 10, then we will reconsider.”<\/p>\n It’s now been another tournament since then, where Cirstea continues to soar, and despite being some way off from breaking into the top-10, the way she is playing is only going to intensify those calls for her to stave off her retirement for now.<\/p>\n Now, following Novak Djokovic’s elimination, she’s now outright the oldest player left in the French Open, aged 36, and in a clay season that has already seen some surprising results with Marta Kostyuk winning Madrid and Elina Svitolina winning Rome, the Romanian can certainly start to dream<\/a>\u00a0here of what may be, if she carries on playing as freely as she’s doing at the moment. It’s been a remarkable turn of events for the Romanian, who did not feature in this tournament last year due to a foot injury and who suffered a first-round exit in 2024.<\/p>\n Cirstea now holds a 27-8 record this season, and her next match pits her against Xiyu Wang<\/a>, where she is the favourite to advance and reach the second week in the French capital. She sat down with the French Open, where she was asked about the reason for this newfound success, and she put it down<\/a> to playing with more joy and less pressure on the results. She might be relishing this period of playing without pressure and rightfully so. But if she continues playing like this and producing the results she’s been producing, then she is sure to face a very different kind of pressure, one you feel she absolutely won’t mind. The pressure not to retire.<\/p>\n Come the end of the season, we might indeed be writing eulogies for the Romanian, but not for the reasons we initially thought. Time will tell!<\/p>\n Main Photo Credit: Susan Mullane – USA TODAY Sports<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sorana Cirstea announced her retirement from tennis at the end of last year. Since the announcement, the overriding question has been simple: why? Based on what she has produced in what is to be her last season on tour, one wonders if the decision isn’t decisively premature. Since making that announcement, she has been playing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5743,"featured_media":56771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,15913,4],"tags":[204,602,364],"class_list":["post-105898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-french-open","category-opinion","category-wta","tag-french-open","tag-sorana-cirstea","tag-wta-tour"],"modified_by":"Shane Black","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5743"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105898"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105935,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105898\/revisions\/105935"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Older, But Not Finished<\/h4>\n