Garbiñe Muguruza’s absence from the circuit will last several more months. The Spanish announced this Monday that she will be out until the summer and that she will not play the clay or grass tours, so she will miss Roland Garros and Wimbledon.
Muguruza, current number 130 in the world, has not competed since he lost in the first round of the Lyon tournament at the end of January and his last victory on the circuit dates from September last year, when he won in the first round in Tokyo. The two-time Grand Slam winner decided in January to take a break to recharge her batteries and rethink the coming months of competition and now she has announced her intention to extend her vacation.
“Spending time with family and friends has been really healthy and amazing, so I’m going to extend this period until the summer… I’m going to miss the clay and grass season,” announced the Caracas-born player, who, like minimum, it will not reappear until the American cement tour.
Garbiñe Muguruza currently has 512 points in his locker and not participating in the clay tour or the grass tour will mean losing an additional 172 points, so that, at the end of Wimbledon (which did not distribute points last year), he will have 340. This threatens to knock him out of the top 200 in the world, a position he has not held since March 2012, when he was just 18 years old.
Muguruza’s fall in the Grand Slams began after the final of the Australian Open in 2020. Since that title lost with Sofia Kenin, which would have been her third major, the Spanish-Venezuelan has not returned to the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam and he only reached the round of 16 on one occasion, at the 2021 United States Open. In three of the last four Grand Slams he has played, he has lost in his debut and in 2022 he barely played 29 games, with a negative balance of 12 wins and 17 losses. His last victory against a tennis player within the 100 best in the world was in August last year, in the first round of the US Open, while he has not beaten a ‘top ten’ player since November 2021, when he won the Masters Cup. in Guadalajara, an attempt at resurrection that has been unable to continue.
The good news for Muguruza is that in the final stretch of the season he hardly defends anything, since in the final months of 2022 his best results were the third round reached in New York and the second in Tokyo and Canada. The problem is that his failure in the ranking will force him to receive invitations and pass previous rounds in order to be in the best tournaments. There Muguruza will have to show if, at almost 30 years of age, he has enough motivation to carve out a place for himself once again among the elite of world tennis, the one that he once dominated and that is now so far away.
