Alizé Cornet, French number one and 39th player in the world, disappeared from the table of the Lyon tournament from the first day. The blue heroine of the last Australian Open – she had reached the quarter-finals there, a first for her in a Grand Slam – did not last long at the WTA tournament disputed in Gerland, where she was seeded number four and where she was beaten in her first game on Monday.
Facing her, the Spaniard Cristina Bucsa, from qualifying and ranked 139th in the world, perfectly digested the deadweight loss of the first round and even took off in the last, winning after 2h09 (1- 6, 6-4, 6-1).
We had to go back to Roland-Garros 2021 to find traces of a more significant “counter” for Cornet, who then lost from the start to his compatriot Harmony Tan, then 149th WTA. Conversely, Cristina Bucsa, 24, had never won against a player ranked in the top 60 in the world. The Spaniard will face the winner of the first round on Wednesday, which will pit Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska against Romania’s Ana Bogdan on Tuesday.
