Li Na drops out of the Top-10 player rankings – Tennis News
Former French Open champion, Li Na, is not in theTop-10 world rankings anymore. She has dropped to the 11th spot after failing to retain her title in Paris, France. She was eager to repeat the heroics of the last year
but was stopped by the Kazakh qualifier, Yaroslava Shvedova, in the fourth round.
It was a disappointing end to the promising campaign especially considering that the Chinese number one won the opening set 6-3 but faced two shocking set defeats with scores of 2-6, 0-6 that forced her out of the competition.
Shvedova impressed everyone and reached the quarter-final stage of the tournament; was leading the 4-2 in the final set against the Wimbledon Champion, Petra Kvitova, but couldn’t find strength to hang on and win the contest.
Li was very depressed after her loss and requested the media representatives to leave her alone for a while. She needed to discuss the situation with her husband-c*m-coach and then decide about her future. She was indecisive about
whether to stay in Europe and practice for the grass court season or to return back to the native land. It is not easy to face the criticism from the local media reporters. They were circulating the news about her retirement as well. So, it is obviously a
very difficult task to handle inappropriate criticism especially at the age of 30 when you have few years left in the professional career.
She stated in one of the interviews, “I will take some days off to totally forget tennis, and then try to come back next week. Right now I have not decided if I am staying here to play Birmingham or go back to China to recover.
I lost one match so don't try to put me down. This is tennis. I will try to find the reason why I lost."
She has always faced a lot of difficulties in sustaining the glamorous celebrity image and this downturn must have hurt her a lot but this is her chance to hit back at the critics in the grass court season and reclaim the Top-10
spot.
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