WIMBLEDON, England — The draw ceremony on Friday morning for the women’s singles tournament at Wimbledon gave Serena Williams a comfortable start on the path toward a possible eighth title here.
Williams, seeded 25th despite a world ranking of No. 183 after she took time off to have a baby last year, opens against 107th-ranked Arantxa Rus of the Netherlands, who has not won a match at Wimbledon since 2012. That match, weather permitting, will be played Tuesday, along with all other first-round matches in the bottom half of the women’s draw.
In the second round, Williams would face the winner of a match between No. 136 Viktoriya Tomova, a qualifier, and No. 167 Tereza Smitkova, who earned a wild card by winning a lower-level tournament last week in Ilkley, England.
Placed in the lowest bracket of seeded players, Williams was guaranteed to have to face one of the top eight players in the third round. She drew fifth-seeded Elina Svitolina, who may be the least comfortable of the top eight on grass. Svitolina reached the fourth round of Wimbledon last year, but before that had never advanced past the second round. She has a record of 10-11 on grass in her career.
In the fourth round, Williams could face a player with a lower ranking but a stronger grass pedigree: either 10th-seeded Madison Keys, the United States Open runner-up last year, who has won two grass court titles, or 19th-seeded Magdalena Rybarikova, who reached the Wimbledon semifinals last year.
Williams is in the bottom quarter of the draw, which is anchored by second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki, who has never reached a quarterfinal at Wimbledon. Other possible quarterfinal opponents for Williams include 32nd-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska, whom Williams beat in the 2012 final here, and 16th-seeded CoCo Vandeweghe, a two-time Wimbledon quarterfinalist.
Fourth-seeded Sloane Stephens, the U.S. Open champion and French Open runner-up, anchors the other quarter in the bottom half of the draw. She is joined there by seventh-seeded Karolina Pliskova and ninth-seeded Venus Williams, last year’s Wimbledon runner-up.
The top half of the women’s draw, which will begin play on Monday, includes third-seeded Garbiñe Muguruza, the defending champion, who opens against a British wild card, Naomi Broady. Also on the top half of the draw are top-seeded Simona Halep and eighth-seeded Petra Kvitova, who was the oddsmakers’ favorite before the draw was made. In the fourth round, Kvitova could face the winner of a possible third-round match between the five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova and the 2017 French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko.
The men’s draw, which normally features fewer well-known players among the unseeded ranks, this time has two unseeded players who were among the top five seeds in last year’s tournament.
Andy Murray, a two-time Wimbledon champion and the top seed here last year, is now ranked 156th and unseeded after missing 11 months of competition. He received an uncomfortable start to his tournament with a first-round match against Benoît Paire and a second-round match against either Jérémy Chardy, who has a 12-2 record on grass this year, or 26th-seeded Denis Shapovalov, the Wimbledon junior champion two years before.
Stan Wawrinka, seeded fifth here last year, is also unseeded, with a ranking of 225th. In the most high-profile first-round match in either draw, Wawrinka drew sixth-seeded Grigor Dimitrov, a Wimbledon semifinalist in 2014, in the first round.
The top men’s players who have maintained high rankings received considerably more comfortable openings. The defending champion and top seed Roger Federer will face 57th-ranked Dusan Lajovic, with 94th-ranked Lukas Lacko or the 285th-ranked qualifier Benjamin Bonzi looming in the second round.
In the fourth round, Federer could face 16th-ranked Borna Coric, who beat him in the final of a grass court tournament in Halle, Germany, this month.
Rafael Nadal, who is the top-ranked player in the ATP but was seeded second behind Federer because of the Wimbledon seeding formula’s weighting of success on grass, will open against 129th-ranked Dudi Sela, and would face 93rd-ranked Vasek Pospisil or 90th-ranked Mikhail Kukushkin in the second round. The seeds he is likeliest to face earliest in the tournament, No. 29 Marco Cecchinato and No. 14 Diego Schwartzman, have never won a match at Wimbledon.
Source : NYtimes
