LIVE TEXT Sorana Cîrstea, tested in Rome by the rebel Ostapenko. The €289,115 match starts at 14:00
The tennis player Sorana Cîrstea (36 years old, 27 WTA) continues to play fabulously in her retirement season, and today she has a match with the Latvian Jelena Ostapenko (28 years old, 36 WTA), who is returning to form. The quarter-final duel in Rome takes place from 14:00. A prize of 289,115 euros and 390 points in the world ranking awaits the winner.
Sorana can put another brick in the Italian tournament Photo EPA
Jelena Ostapenko reaches the quarterfinals for the fifth time. After surviving duels with Elena-Gabriela Ruse and Qinwen Zheng, in which she came back from losing the first set, the unseeded Latvian crushed Anna Kalinskaya 6-1, 6-2, avenging her first-round defeat in Dubai earlier this season.
Ostapenko was in modest form before the tournament in Rome. Since the end of the 2025 clay season, she had managed to win multiple matches in a row in just a handful of tournaments, leading to a semi-final in Doha and a round four in Miami. Ranked 18th at the same time last year, it recently dropped to 40th.
Sorana Cîrstea ticked off her third win over Linda Noskova in 2026 from four encounters as she prevailed 6-2, 6-4, confirming her first quarter-final appearance at a tournament since 2012. However, her most impressive win of the campaign came against world No.1 Aryna Sabalenka in the third round.
Cîrstea announced her impending retirement during the competitive break and, since then, she has started playing her best tennis. She won her third and fourth career titles since August, in Cleveland and Cluj-Napoca. Along with a number of other good results, she is now back in the top 30, climbing from the 169th position she held in June 2025.
History of direct matches
Jelena Ostapenko leads 4-3. The Latvian won their only clay court encounter so far, here in Rome in the 2023 edition, in three sets.
However, Sorana Cîrstea won the last two head-to-head meetings, in Wuhan at the end of 2025 and in Brisbane in January, without dropping a set, thus closing the gap. Jelena Ostapenko is 1-3 in Italian Open quarterfinals, reaching the semifinals in 2023.
Ostapenko has reached just two semi-finals on clay since winning Roland-Garros in 2017, the most recent being in Stuttgart in April 2025.
Sorana Cîrstea is going to play the tenth quarter-final since the beginning of 2025, having a record of 5-4 in the previous ones.
Cîrstea reached a dozen semifinals on clay in her career, but never above the WTA 250 level.
