A terrific week of WTA Cleveland tennis ends with a final between Sorana Cirstea and Ann Li. Cirstea has more experience on her side, but Li will be backed by an American home crowd. We here at LWOT provide our prediction and analysis in this article, but which player do you expect to win the title?<\/p>\n
Head-to-head: Li 1-0 Cirstea<\/p>\n
Cirstea has been in devastating form in Cleveland. The 35-year-old did not drop a set in qualifying matches against Anna Frey and Rebeka Masarova, and main draw contests with Moyuka Uchijima, Jil Teichmann, Liudmila Samsonova, and Anastasia Zakharova. After starting with a straight-sets triumph against Yuliia Starodubtseva, Li needed three sets to overcome Iva Jovic, Elsa Jacquemot, and Xinu Wang. She failed to convert five match points in the second set against Wang, but showed a lot of courage to bounce back in the third.<\/p>\n
Both players have similar playing styles. Each tries to dominate during the rallies with their forehands and avoid hitting too many backhands consecutively. Cirstea’s forehand is flatter, and the Romanian possesses a more powerful serve. Li will almost certainly need to defend successfully for periods of this match to have a chance of winning against one of the most aggressive players on the WTA Tour.<\/p>\n
Cirstea might be slightly more nervous since she may not get many more opportunities to win titles at her age. Nonetheless, I am still backing the veteran to win. Her level has been the best in Cleveland by far, and she is capable of riding that momentum. This should also be a decent matchup for Cirstea since she often struggles against players who thrive on extending the rallies. Li is not a natural defender and might become frustrated that she cannot regularly dictate the rallies.<\/p>\n
Prediction: Cirstea in 2<\/em><\/p>\n Main Photo Credit: Geoff Burke – Imagn Images<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A terrific week of WTA Cleveland tennis ends with a final between Sorana Cirstea and Ann Li. Cirstea has more experience on her side, but Li will be backed by an American home crowd. We here at LWOT provide our prediction and analysis in this article, but which player do you expect to win the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4708,"featured_media":86968,"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":[69],"tags":[10120,15969,602,15445,2373,2369,16624],"class_list":["post-89213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-predictions","tag-ann-li","tag-ann-li-predictions","tag-sorana-cirstea","tag-sorana-cirstea-predictions","tag-tennis-picks","tag-tennis-predictions","tag-wta-cleveland-predictions"],"modified_by":"Shane Black","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89213","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\/4708"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89213"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89218,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89213\/revisions\/89218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}